Customer-owned Networks: ZapMail & Telecoms

sasha writes "Here's a good article that describes how we, the consumers, can play the role of competitors to the vendors of products and services we buy. The author draws a parallel between FedEx's ZapMail failure and current situation with VoIP and WiFi in regard to the phone companies."

Comments

Fiber has replaced copper?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Those days are long over, as copper wires have been largely replaced by fiber optic cable."

Tell that to the guys working at the thousands and thousands of wiring frames in telco central offices.

Re:Fiber has replaced copper?

[DShard]

The article was about the last mile being replaced by Wi-Fi. You thought it was easy to tap your phone now...

Re:Fiber has replaced copper?

[march]

Depends on how you look at it.

I don't know for sure, but I bet if you add up the total bandwidth and figure the percent run over fiber, the amount of fiber is use is huge.

I know we have fiber coming into the worksite. Three of them...

But then again, some statistics are meaningless...

Re:Fiber has replaced copper?

[antis0c]

There are a lot more important and used things then just regular POTS lines. Heck, just down the street from me they replaced a hunk of old copper with fiber. Sucks for anyone wanting to get DSL over there though.

Re:Fiber has replaced copper?

[stilwebm]

My entire side of town was constructed with fiber to the last mile starting in 1991. Unfortunatley that means I cannot get DSL.

Almost all new constuction in this area (Nashville, TN) is using fiber. The copper only starts at the little green box every few blocks.

What we need, is to get rid of the monopolies.

[Kethinov]

The problem with communications technologies is that there is a monopoly in the industry. Well perhaps not a monoply, but certainly an oligopy. How many phone companies can you name off the top of your head? 5? How about ISPs? Communications aren't advancing at the pace of technology because none of these capitalists want to give up their precious money.

Perhaps that's why we don't have wireless internet access everywhere in the U.S. or why cars still run on non-renewable resources even though there are safe, clean, easy-to-produce alternatives. Companies which fill our cars with gas, provide us with barely stable internet access, and manufacture paper take advantage of public ignorance so much that "we are literally wiping our ass with our own future," as a great man once said.

Re:What we need, is to get rid of the monopolies.

[DShard]

They are a government regulated monopoly as long as they own 80% of homes and businesses in any given area. That was why Covad and other CLEC's failed. They still had to pay the bells.

Re:What we need, is to get rid of the monopolies.

[NineNine]

Fuck wireless Internet. That's still a toy. There *has* been real progress. 5 years ago I had a shitty, expensive analog cell phone. Today, I have a cheap digital cell phone that provides excellent service across the country. That's called progress. Just because wireless Net isn't here yet doesn't mean there's no competition. There also aren't flying cars yet, but that doesn't mean that it's due to a lack of competition. Ever turn on a TV? See the hundreds and hundreds of cell phone ads? That's called c-o-m-p-e-t-i-t-i-o-n.

Re:What we need, is to get rid of the monopolies.

[LaissezFaire]

As long as the government doesn't mandate or forbid things, we are rid of the monopolies. The definition of monopoly was originally based on whether or not the government allowed competition.

The problems in the marketplace aren't "market failures" that the government needs to fix for you (at no small cost), but areas where the government has forced things to work a particular way.

Entrepreneurs like to make money. And as long as they aren't forbidden to entera sector of the market, and it's profitable, they will. And it's the customers that vote with their pocketbooks that allow it to happen. It's a beautiful thing.

Re:What we need, is to get rid of the monopolies.

[Anonymous Coward]

What a load of crap. Do you honestly think for one second that 580 dinky but advanced companies could build any kind of nation-wide network? The major telcos only build what can be profitable for them, yes. But, think about this: building any kind of network takes TONS of money. The infrastructure costs are enormous, both for cable (be it copper or fiber) and equipment. At a whopping 40 bucks per customer a month (for instance) you have to have a couple million customers just to break even on your setup and operating costs. Joebob's 6-block Wireless ISP obviously can't handle that. So you're left with two options: huge phone companies that take what's possible and cut it down to what's realistic, or having a network built and controlled by the government. If you've ever stood in line at the DMV, or been stuck in traffic during rush hour while the state workers have a lane closed to pick up trash should tell you what a HORRIBLE idea that is. Quit whining about the phone companies, the fact remains that someone HAS to build and own the network. Even for the Bells, installing WAPs all over the country would cost billions, even if they were to use cheap-ass Linksys APs or something, think of how many APs they'd need to get universal coverage. Now, figure out how many people would subscribe at 40-50 bucks a month (all the market will bare) and do the math. Oh, gee...10000 subscribers can't make up for the $50 billion we spent on all this crap. Frankly I'm shocked.

Re:What we need, is to get rid of the monopolies.

[kien]

As long as the government doesn't mandate or forbid things, we are rid of the monopolies. The definition of monopoly was originally based on whether or not the government allowed competition.

I don't think we are ever really rid of monopolies but I do agree that the government plays are large role in the regulation of monopolies. You should read the full history of AT&T. It's such a mixed bag. Here we have a government-regulated monopoly for most of the 20th century that essentially laid the last mile (i.e. the copper line), invented the transistor, invented UNIX, gave UNIX away (yay!), got busted into different companies, tried to take UNIX back (boo!), and is struggling to compete today. (If there's a RUN-ON sentence option for modding down...go for it. :) I'm left wondering what would have happened if AT&T had been broken up in the 1940s...would we be further along than we are now or even further behind?

--K.

Re:What we need, is to get rid of the monopolies.

[Anonymous Coward]

5 years ago I had a shitty, expensive analog cell phone. Today, I have a cheap digital cell phone that provides excellent service across the country. That's called progress.

That's funny, my digital cell phone plan is more expensive than my old analog phone was 5 years ago. In fact, it's $10 a month more and all I have to show for it is 250 "free" minutes compared to 100 "free" minutes under the analog plan. I don't notice any difference in sound quality. With digital it either works or it disconnects. With analog it got staticy but usually didn't drop. What an advance. My digital cell phone is the same size as my old analog Nokia cell phone yet cost much more than it. What are YOUR advantages?

Re:What we need, is to get rid of the monopolies.

[Anonymous Coward]

There also aren't flying cars yet, but that doesn't mean that it's due to a lack of competition. Ever turn on a TV? See the hundreds and hundreds of cell phone ads? That's called c-o-m-p-e-t-i-t-i-o-n.

You're the Microsoft apologist right? Ever turn on a TV? Ever see an alternative PC operating system ad? No? Neither have I. That's called a m-o-n-o-p-o-l-y not c-o-m-p-e-t-i-t-i-o-n. :-)

Re:What we need, is to get rid of the monopolies.

[Jeremi]

Thank you, Ayn Rand. Now answer me this: If a single company (or organization of cooperating companies) gets powerful enough (one way or another) to squash all competition in its chosen market, how is that market any less "failed" than one where the government forbids all competition? In either case there is no competition, hence no innovation, and usually the customer ends up getting gouged.

Re:What we need, is to get rid of the monopolies.

[chriso11]

You overstate the benevolence of the local phone companies.
Guess what? CONSUMERS paid for the telephone network, ok?

Guess what else? The reason you can call anywhere - Anywhere - ANYWHERE - in the country is because of the Federal Gov't. It forced the phone company to string phone line to North Bumblecrap, Nowhere. If it weren't for the Feds, half the country wouldn't have phone service, lessening the value of the network for everyone.

If you think the Federal Government is so incompetent, how about talking to IBM and have them run the Military? The quasi-governmental Post Office is also underrated. Who else will take your letter anywhere in the country for 37cents? Sometimes it actually winds up where you wanted it too!

Yeah, I admit that there are a lot of inefficiences in the Government. But, Industry is barely better - remember Iridium, Zapmail, Enron,?

Re:What we need, is to get rid of the monopolies.

[xilmaril]

maybe it's different in your part of the continent, but ever noticed they're all ads for the same 2-3 companies ads?

Re:What we need, is to get rid of the monopolies.

[LaissezFaire]

No, not Ayn Rand, but more Paleolibertarian. The nice things about "natural monopolies" is they don't exist in the real world. The standard examples of companies like Standard Oil fall short, mostly because they were in the process of having their butt handed to them in a sling by smaller competitors when the Sherman Act came through.

In the Austrian school of economics you find out that a company can never get big enough to fully crush all competition. Ludwig von Mises proved, for example, in the 1930's that Socialism couldn't work because in a planned economy, you just don't know how much stuff is supposed to cost. Socialism

Small companies form, take those monopoly rents away, and the big company loses market share. Open source software is doing this now. Yes, Microsoft has a big market share, but linux is severly impinging on the server market, and threatens the desktop market.

Cell phones are doing this now, both in the US and overseas. It's a great way to solve the old last mile problem. Who knows, maybe without the huge, inefficient power monopolies we'd have a lot of nuclear power plants, or smaller, more numerous plants without the cost of the extremely long transmission lines with the booster stations, or wind power, or even more solar! But it's the government restrictions on who could enter the market that causes market irregularities.

Read more about the exiciting world of Austrian Economics at the Mises institute and LewRockwell.com

Re:What we need, is to get rid of the monopolies.

[LaissezFaire]

Yes, consumers paid for the telephone network. And in a free market, those monies would be paid voluntarily to the phone company for producing a product.

Yes, the government can mandate some good things. But about the best you can say for government mandates is that if they're the kind you like (and other people would pay for, too), the private sector would do it. And while discussions about what might have happened are fun, I can as easily imagine that if the government hadn't mandated copper being strung all over, the phone companies would have put in satellite phones, developed with all the money they saved in taxes.

Sure, there are inefficiencies in the private sector. And they are vicously attacked by competitors. One reason Alan Greenspan (the chairman of the Federal Reserve for non-US folks) kept lowering lending rates is so the Dow Jones wouldn't tank. Well, it did anyway, and liquidated the inefficient firms created and bouyed up through malinvestment. How did it help anyone that the bubble was sustained?

Enron is a great case for this. Why did the employees have a lot of Enron stock? Congress decided it would be a fine and noble thing if employees owned more of their companies, and passed laws to make this really easy. So when the company tanked, the well meaning Congress had helped tank the employees, too.

The Swiss have a very decentralized military, and they haven't been invaded in a long time. I agree, though, if you want to be an empire, taxation and a Federal military is the way to go.

And the post office . . . who says it should cost as much for me to send a letter from Colorado to Maine as it does from L.A. to San Francisco? Or down the street? I do know, though, that if you try to setup your own 1st class mail company you'll be arrested.

Re:What we need, is to get rid of the monopolies.

[Trolling4Dollars]

Byootiful! Lovely!! If you have an account, please befriend me. I think we agree about NineNine. Plus check out my journal...

Re:What we need, is to get rid of the monopolies.

[Qzukk]

Normal c-o-m-p-e-t-i-t-i-o-n drives innovation, as each company has to come up with the new thing to get people to buy it.

5 years ago Japanese schoolgirls had cheap cellphones with more power than your cheap cell phone. It can hardly be called "progress" when we continue playing "keep up with the Joneses" so to speak.

Recently the gap has been closing. But take a look at other countries' recent offerings (for links, just look through The Register archives).

Part of the problem is the FCC restricting the features of broadcast. Part of the problem is phone companies not wanting to invest in changing. Part of the problem is that people either don't know or don't care about what they could be getting for their money.

I'm the first to admit that I'm in that last group. I don't really like cellphones and when I am eventually forced to get one, I'll try to get the least whiz-bang model I can find because I don't care about all that extra jazz.

Re:What we need, is to get rid of the monopolies.

[gmack]

In Canada we take our monopolies and regulate the hell out of them. They get minimum service requirements or the customer gets to complain. They don't get to raise the basic services prices without going to the CRTC and justifying why.

What do we have? An excellent phone system at a reasonable price and the land based telcos seem to be doing rather well for themselves finantialy.

Regulation isn't the problem it's incompetant regulation. Had the US done what Canada did I'm sure it would have been much less of a burden on AT&T than what ended up happening. And you would probably have gotten better service out of it too.

Re:What we need, is to get rid of the monopolies.

[spRed]

What everyone forgets about, if they knew of it in the first place, is the free rider effect.

The US bears most of the cost for most of the technological innovation for the entire world. Other countries producing things at a commodity price is easy -- once those things are already commodities.

Countries without a copper telco infrastructure are going pure wireless. Not because they put in the R&D, but because the R&D is already done. The infrastructure can be bought at commodity prices and a wireless infrastructure is cheaper than one made from copper strings & trees.

Drug prices are the primo example. US consumers pay the cost and the rest of the world reaps the benefits. The marginal cost of making a bottle of pills is low, manufacturing the chemicals once you know which ones to make is cheap. Selling at a low price in a poor country makes sense, if you charged $1 more no one would buy it and you would make no profits. But once 1st world countries say your choices are sell at the government approved price (which is similar to the 3rd world price) or we will copy your invention and sell it at that price anyway, you are screwed. The cost of R&D isn't recouped and it isn't worthwhile to make the next useful drug.

Or more exactly, the countries that agree to pay the /real/ price are screwed, and you get a freebie. For a little bit, then the drug companies go out of business and everyone loses.

Re:What we need, is to get rid of the monopolies.

[Anonymous Coward]

ISPs? Without looking anywhere (and some of these are local and one was a former employer):

Earthlink
Netzero
Juno
Fishnet
Fastnet
Voic enet
Netaxs
Arczip (what I used until I moved and got a cable modem)
enter.net (what my father uses - he can't get a cable modem where he lives).

YOU LOSE.

Re:What we need, is to get rid of the monopolies.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not just incompetent, corrupt. The FCC typically favors the industry over the customers, and the incumbents over the competitors.

Re:What we need, is to get rid of the monopolies.

[EvlG]

Why didn't the government just own and regulate the last mile? This is a point I have never understood, and it seems that if it had been done, things would be so much simpler today.

Re:What we need, is to get rid of the monopolies.

[Eristone]

5 years ago Japanese schoolgirls had cheap cellphones with more power than your cheap cell phone. It can hardly be called "progress" when we continue playing "keep up with the Joneses" so to speak.

It's easier to implement infrastructure changes when the area you have to deal with is slightly smaller than California. It's all those empty (sans people) miles of desert, mountain and farm land that hold back a lot of things because it's downright expensive to cover the whole of the U.S.

You'll notice that you don't get digital cellular reception everywhere in the country - a whole bunch of places will drop back to analog - or just drop - once you get away from the Interstate highways. Take a look at the coverage maps for Verizon, AT&T and Sprint.

Re:What we need, is to get rid of the monopolies.

[madfgurtbn]

Yes, Microsoft has a big market share, but linux is severly impinging on the server market, and threatens the desktop market.

Linux is not "competition" to M$. Linux is not a company. It may be a threat, but it is not economic competition in the classic sense. It is technological/social competition. No less threatening to M$, but indicative of how powerful the monopoly is--the only real threat to the monopoly is one that cannot be beaten economically. M$ cannot buy the company, cannot undercut it's pricing, cannot cut off its air supply. The competition has evolved gills which allow it to breathe without air.

But it's the government restrictions on who could enter the market that causes market irregularities.

If gov't restrictions cause monopolies, shouldn't the intellectual property laws which created the M$ monopoly be repealed, freeing the markets? M$ is not a monopoly if cannot copyright or patent their work. Wouldn't that be the logical next step in laissez faire? It would certainly make for a lot more competition.

Re:What we need, is to get rid of the monopolies.

[hagardtroll]

So what are you suggesting we wipe our asses with?

Re:What we need, is to get rid of the monopolies.

[blibbleblobble]

Grid networking. Specifically, grid-wireless-networking. All it takes is for one WiFi router every few miles, and occasional high-speed links to other parts of the (inter)network.

Re:What we need, is to get rid of the monopolies.

[SubtleNuance]

Huh? Tell that to Nortel, JDS Uniphase, and Telsat Canada (who built and ran the first commercial domestic telecommunication satellite) - Canada is far and away the leader in telecommunications technology - now and since day one.

and you can stop this "we innovate they just mass produce" dogma -- American-Domestic propaganda, pure B.S. - America isnt the only nation with a Research heritage.

Re:What we need, is to get rid of the monopolies.

[fsickert]

There are NO easy-to-produce alternatives to gasoline.

Re:What we need, is to get rid of the monopolies.

[VirtualAdept]

You said:Part of the problem is the FCC restricting the features of broadcast. Part of the problem is phone companies not wanting to invest in changing. Part of the problem is that people either don't know or don't care about what they could be getting for their money. I'm the first to admit that I'm in that last group. I don't really like cellphones and when I am eventually forced to get one, I'll try to get the least whiz-bang model I can find because I don't care about all that extra jazz. I'm saying: It seems to me like those problems are related. If people were clammoring over the features that Japanese and European consumers are getting, then the phone companies would be putting in the money to change. Instead, most customers just seem to want to talk on their cell phones and not want the enhanced features.

Re:What we need, is to get rid of the monopolies.

[LaissezFaire]

I use some simplistic definitions. Here, since companies that sell (or don't sell, like debian) linux are eating into proprietary Unix and MS market share, I call that competition. I think this is fair, since we already speak of "competing standards."

M$ cannot buy the company, cannot undercut it's pricing, cannot cut off its air supply.

We agree. Opensource is something new and different.

IP laws are a bit funny. There is a fair argument to scrap Patents and move it into copyright law. I have links in an old post of mine, here The Baen free library has some links to a copule of great speaches in England a hundred years ago about the extension of copyrights. Very well done.

Re:What we need, is to get rid of the monopolies.

[HiThere]

Monopoly isn't necessarily dependant on government, at least not on formal government. When a tribe plunks down at an oasis, and charges tolls to every caravan that wants to cross the dessert, that's monopoly in action. Note that in theory the caravans could just haul extra water. Nothing is stopping them. So this isn't even an absolute monopoly. But to haul extra water would cut down on their cargo, so they'd rather pay the tolls.

The difference when government sanctions a monopoly is that force will be used to protect the monopoly against circumvention measures. This allows the monopoly to charge more than it could without the force protecting it. The equivalent here is a band of raiders paid by the tribe at the oasis who raid the caravans that don't pay the toll.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that all monopolies are intrinsically evil, but they are certainly all dangerous to liberty. Some are even necessary. There's only so much water at the oasis, so you need to limit use. But this doesn't make them any less dangerous.

Re:What we need, is to get rid of the monopolies.

[LaissezFaire]

What I suspect would happen is it would freeze out any improvements. One thing that happens once a government standard (usually minimum standard) is in place, than it is officially "good enough".

Alternatively, companies then focus their effort on getting taxpayer money spent to improve / extend the service instead of doing it themselves. This would possibly eliminate mobile phones -- why would a company investigate this if the gov't did their piece for "free?"

Finally, gov't only likes dealing with one vendor at a time. It is a NIGHTMARE to bid on gov't contracts. You need a special number, for which you have to go through an extensive approval process, or you hook into a company that has already done that. (This is a way to get around many of the requirements that Congress thought would be helpful.) All of this is a barrier to entry for small companies and individuals, any of which may have already built a better mousetrap.

Re:What we need, is to get rid of the monopolies.

[HiThere]

Regulatory commissions generally become controlled by the companies that they regulate.

You said " we take our monopolies and regulate the hell out of them", but it's important to remember that this we refers to the government, not to any citizen, or even the citizenry en-mass. And it's not the entire government, it's one particular piece of it. I don't know what procedures Canada uses to prevent the companies from suborning the regulatory commissions, but generally if the companies consider it important enough, then they'll find a way. "Favors to friends", perhaps. Employing relatives. Asking them for "suggestions" about who could fill this "vice president for governmental relations" job? Something else?

The US isn't the first country to be devastated by this malady. Britain has been too. And everywhere else that I've looked at closely enough to know. Sometimes it is countered by blatant nepotism (this could be considered indirect nepotism), but I'm not sure how successfully, or whether the cost isn't higher than the gain.

Re:What we need, is to get rid of the monopolies.

[ctimes2]

yeah but... your Canadian. Why would we listen to YOU? ;) (just kidding)

Re:What we need, is to get rid of the monopolies.

[madfgurtbn]

There is a fair argument to scrap Patents and move it into copyright law.

There is certainly room for improvement in all areas of IP legislation. But what I'm getting at is this idea that you seem to be pushing that it is basically a bad idea for gov't to interfere with business and industry because the free market will take care of it much better. You hand wave "market failure" as a problem caused by gov't rather than something mitigated by gov't intervention.

You will find no argument here that the results of gov't regulation are indeed mixed, and the law of unintended consquences applies as well, but to say that the market will take care of market failures is farcical on it's face.

Re:What we need, is to get rid of the monopolies.

[ChaosDiscord]

As long as the government doesn't mandate or forbid things, we are rid of the monopolies. The definition of monopoly was originally based on whether or not the government allowed competition.

Well, yes, I guess, as long as you're willing to use that definition. You wouldn't have monopolies, you'd just have strangeholds on markets created by manipulation of supply, tie ins, and other techniques designed to limit competition.

Meanwhile, the working definition of monopoly has drifted in the last hundred years. For example, Merriam-Webster defines monopoly as "1 : exclusive ownership through legal privilege, command of supply, or concerted action". Heck, government or legal restrictions don't appear in any of M-W's definitions.

Entrepreneurs like to make money. And as long as they aren't forbidden to entera sector of the market, and it's profitable, they will. And it's the customers that vote with their pocketbooks that allow it to happen. It's a beautiful thing.

It's a beautiful thing in theory. The problem is that you can be forbidden to enter a sector of the market by forces other than the government. Your competitors have a great deal of incentive to try and create such limits as quickly as possible. Running an nationwide railroad? Instead of investing in rails, buy up all of the coal sources, preventing your competitors from running at all. Got a dominant position in the market? Tie your customers to you through subtle techniques that will make it unrealistically expense to shift products. Afraid of an upstart competitor making a superior car? Use bogus lawsuits to force him to burn through all of his funding defending himself and drive him out of business.

Perfect capitalism is a beautiful thing, but it has unattainable requirements: perfect competition, low costs to enter a market, well informed consumers in all areas. In the absense of perfect capitalism you're left with a system that functions acceptably, but creates the incentive and potential for monopolies to form. The result is that we as a society need to keep an eye on the system and occasionally tweak things when the system fails.

(Out of context and bit off topic, but I can't resist:)

The problems in the marketplace aren't "market failures" that the government needs to fix for you (at no small cost), but areas where the government has forced things to work a particular way.

A compelling argument. Let's start by getting rid of any laws that grant someone an "exclusive Right" to something, which is clearly a monopoly by your own definition. I suggest starting with copyright, patent, and trademark laws...

Re:What we need, is to get rid of the monopolies.

[Sentry21]

What everyone forgets about, if they knew of it in the first place, is the free rider effect.

The US bears most of the cost for most of the technological innovation for the entire world. Other countries producing things at a commodity price is easy -- once those things are already commodities.

The American 'we do all, we see all, we know all' philosophy seems geared towards guaranteeing this sort of atmosphere. America is the be-all and end-all of everything, therefore other countries don't matter, and since other countries don't matter, America must be the be-all and end-all. It makes no sense, and it only comes around, and can be explained, by the American tendancy to ignore other countries except when impossible to do so, and to forget afterwards about what can't be ignored.

As another poster replied to you, JSD Uniphase, Nortel, and Telsat are industry-leaders. Likewise our biotech industry, which isn't suffering from persecution by those Churchgoers who believe genetic knowledge is for God alone. Also, I will indicate to you RSA, the encryption method that has lasted 50 years, and may well last another 50, developed in no small part in Israel. Cisco Systems runs their R&D in Israel as well, and it sometimes seems Israeli companies make news every month, but I guess you don't hear about them from CNNfn unless they're on the American exchanges, do you?

Open your eyes and look to some international news channels, if you can even get any, and learn some real facts about the world.

Just to put some fact behind my folly, a few Canadian inventions for your consideration - not the least of which is the telephone, courtesy of Alexander Graham Bell, a Canadian, born in Scotland. Among others, the Snowmobile (Bombardier), the AC radio tube, acetylene, the analytical plotter, the G-suit, basketball, the automatic postal sorter, calcium carbide, the light bulb (believe it or not), the compound steam engine, the electric streetcar, IMAX, hydrofoil watercraft, Java, kerosene, the robertson screw (one of the single best inventions in the history of carpentry), radio-transmitted voice, the zipper.... this list is getting long, so you can read the original yourself, and think twice next time you think innovation is American only. For that matter, what about inventions from before the US existed? A curious thought.

--Dan

Re:What we need, is to get rid of the monopolies.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah..and the government specifically (at the time) allowed Ma Bell to be a monopoly in the first place because they realized they were laying out tons and tons of cash in cost-ineffective locations to achieve universal service. Someone's got to give something to get something.

So get up get, get get down, 911 is a joke in VoIP

[Rob Parkhill]

Damn, that doesn't rhyme at all...

I see biggest stumbling block to be the complete lack of 911 service when using a VoIP service like Vontage. Sure, these systems are a pretty nice replacement for your long distance provider if you spend a lot on long distance, but don't fool yourself into thinking that this is a decent replacement for a local land-line just yet. You are better off using your wireless phone instead.

I would hope that someday soon, VoIP systems like this and 911 would play nicely together, but I don't see that happening unless some three-letter governement agency steps in and mandates it.

Nice article

[Uhh_Duh]

But it failed to point out that the big players in the telecom game are already well aware that their product (voice services via copper) are already obsolete. Why do you think the big boys (MCI, Sprint, Qwest) have such massive investments in the internet backbone? They recognize that the future of communications isn't land-line telephones, it's massive internet backbones. This is where every major player in the telecom game has banked their future. They're not idiots sitting in a smoke-filled conference room with no vision -- these people understand that their revenue stream on the internet side will ultimately replace their revenue stream on the consumer / voice side and they are already geared for it.

The point is that switching to the internet backbone for your voice services doesn't hurt them -- it simply moves your service from column A to column B on their balance sheet.

Re:Nice article

[Anonymous Coward]

that's just not true. The $$$ they get from you using voip are much less than the fees and $$$ you pay for a land line.

Your "idiots in a smoke filled room" fits well -- they are trying to figure out how to screw the other large phone and telecom companies and get all the available money for themselves, while making it illegal for anyone else to play.

in short -- it moves your service from Column A to Column B MINUS the amount that VoIP corp X gets and MINUS the voicemail, wiring plan fee, etc. that they get to charge now.

I think the big players would much rather keep things as they have been instead of jumping into the voip world.

Re:Nice article

[56]

I think you're right in that they'd like to keep things the way they are. However, can you honestly say to me that you think we won't be at least 80% switched over to VoIP or something very similar in the next 10 years?

Re:Nice article

[stratjakt]

Heck, they already do VoIP for a large part. Your voice travels up the copper wire, where it's digitized, and packet switched through the same routers that make the internet go, then decoded at the other end.

It's odd how they justify long distance costs - the internet shows that you can communicate from NA to Japan (eg) without a per minute surcharge.

Re:Nice article

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah, bullshit. no carrier grade switch routes traffic in voip form.

voice is digitized by phone switches such as a dms-100 or 5ess, but they don't route between them over IP, but rather proprietary protocols with proprietary signaling over trunk lines. the stuff is multiplexed over a transport like SONET, not packet switched over ip.. what a joke.

Re:Nice article

[Anonymous Coward]

> no carrier grade switch routes traffic in voip form.

Hey Dumbass - switches(layer 2) don't route (layer 3).

Re:Nice article

[Nexx]

I don't know in the US, but in Japan, BBTec has a 12Mbps ADSL service + VoIP phone. It may only be feasible in a high population density country like Japan, though, and I'm not 100% sure they're not hemmorhaging money just yet.

However, the VoIP voice quality isn't too horrible, but then, POTS voice quality isn't exactly CD-grade.

Re:Nice article

[56]

Things like that are hapening in the US, at Stanford.

Re:Nice article

[Nexx]

That's a research project, right? BBTec in Japan is offering the VoIP stuff as a commercial project, that is available currently. Calling US with the service is cheaper than making traditional intra-country long-distance calls with the likes of NTT (heck, it's competitive with the *local* per-minute rates we're forced to pay via NTT).

Re:Nice article

[56]

It's an implimentation of VoIP in an attempt to replace the analog phone system. It's being done by Stanford's in-house phone company.

Re:Nice article

[Mr. Slippery]

Your voice travels up the copper wire, where it's digitized, and packet switched through the same routers that make the internet go

I believe that voice traffic in the PSTN is carried over circuit-switched networks. (It's multiplexed onto the line in strange ways, but not really packet-switched.) Control information goes over the packet-switched SS7 network.

Phone Companies/Internet Access

[derfel]

Don't the phone companies already have pretty good control over internet access? Dial-up through the phone lines, DSL kind of goes through there too, and the cable companies are either phone companies or closely related to them. Once the phone companies lose the revenue stream from over charging us for phone access, they'll just charge us more for internet access. Well, I guess they'll do that either way.

Re:Phone Companies/Internet Access

[Anne Thwacks]

Voip is to phone companies what word processors were to typewriter manufacturers.
Basically VIOP means free calls to anywhere in the world.

Intercontinental calls are often in the region of 60c PER MINUTE at present (call Africa from Europe if you dont believe me).

With the threat of death hanging over them, are you surprised they won't deliver decent broad band?

Re:So get up get, get get down, 911 is a joke in V

[dirvish]

I don't see that happening unless some three-letter governement agency steps in and mandates it.

Yeah, consumers take control from teh telcos and then have it regulated by a government agency. Great.

Not quite the same thing...

[NineNine]

A. VOIP isn't that simple. Not yet. I can't buy anything at Wal-Mart and plug it into the wall. Until it's that easy, people won't do it.

B. You need broadband. Broadband is far from ubiquitous, and will probably remain so for a good while until customers (such as myself) see a real need for it.

C. My options now are to pay $50/month for broadband plus some amount for software and hardware, or pay $25/month for phone service plus $5 for a phone.

D. VOIP is moot as cell phones are becoming increasingly better and cheaper. I can call anyone in the country from anywhere in the country as part of the minutes I buy every month. Why would I want to step backwards to be tied down to a land line (ie: Net connection)? I don't.

Re:Not quite the same thing...

[davidstrauss]

A. VOIP isn't that simple. Not yet. I can't buy anything at Wal-Mart and plug it into the wall. Until it's that easy, people won't do it.
I think this has potential as a feature in Wi-Fi routers: a broadband line + router + WiFi handset phone would at least not complicate the phone setup any more than broadband Internet setup.

B. You need broadband. Broadband is far from ubiquitous, and will probably remain so for a good while until customers (such as myself) see a real need for it.
Canada actually is implementing a universal broadband access plan.

C. My options now are to pay $50/month for broadband plus some amount for software and hardware, or pay $25/month for phone service plus $5 for a phone.

We actually pay around $50/month for metro phone service and another $40/month for broadband. Paying only one would be cheaper.

D. VOIP is moot as cell phones are becoming increasingly better and cheaper. I can call anyone in the country from anywhere in the country as part of the minutes I buy every month. Why would I want to step backwards to be tied down to a land line (ie: Net connection)? I don't.
As cell phones implement Internet features, VoIP will become a viable cell technology. Instead of running the cell Internet services over a small digital or analog pipe intended for voice, voice and data can share a large one.

Granted, VoIP needs some work (i.e. 911), but don't sell it short for its potential.

Re:Not quite the same thing...

[psychosis]

Good points, and I've heard most of them when discussing VOIP with others. A few observations based on the linked article and the Vonage pages:
a) You can plug any phone you want into the Cisco VOIP box. Many new homes are being built with CAT5 in every room, run to a single location called the "head end." Just put the VOIP box at the head end, then run it's voice side to whatever plug(s) in the house you want. Any wal-mart phone will work.
b) True. Broadband is still expanding, though, and some of the maps I've seen (not sales drone maps, either) show that while square-mileage coverage is not up too high, population-density coverage is not doing too badly.
c) Right now, though I pay $70 for DSL (static IP and extra bandwidth to webhost from home - toad.net rocks!), then $45 for phone, taxes, caller id (damn telemarketers), and 50 mins of long distance per month. I could drop that $115 to $95 with VOIP. I already pay for DSL and I'm not giving that up any time soon.
d) I agree here. Some places are pretty spotty in the coverage department (much spottier than broadband sometimes), but the long distance and mobility of wireless phones are pretty unbeatable.
I guess that with VOIP, like most other things, there's a market, and some folks will really benefit from it. Others won't...
Cool technology, nonetheless!!!

Re:Not quite the same thing...

[Em Ellel]

A. VOIP isn't that simple. Not yet. I can't buy anything at Wal-Mart and plug it into the wall. Until it's that easy, people won't do it.


From my understanding at least Vonage uses analog telephones which you can buy in Wal-Mart (and probably already have) which plug into a little cisco box which plugs into your DSL/Cable/Broadband connection (which I believe you can also buy in Wal-Mart).

B. You need broadband. Broadband is far from ubiquitous, and will probably remain so for a good while until customers (such as myself) see a real need for it.


True, but Broadband is growing fast. Heck, everyone I know and their grandmothers (literaly) are getting it. The real catch is that this only applies to non-DSL broadband, since most Bells force you to get a phone line to install DSL onto. I do not believe you can get DSL w/o paying for a phone line.


C. My options now are to pay $50/month for broadband plus some amount for software and hardware, or pay $25/month for phone service plus $5 for a phone.


So it may not be for you, but many people are already paying both. So since they already pay $50/mos for broadband, paying $25 to Bell vs paying $26 to Vonage is not that different, excpet they get A LOT more from the Vonage service for their buck like 500 minutes of LD and a few pennies per minute after, Voice Mail, remote access and most importantly complete number portability (ever move 10 blocks down the street and be forced to change your phone number by the bell? I have, it sucks!)


D. VOIP is moot as cell phones are becoming increasingly better and cheaper. I can call anyone in the country from anywhere in the country as part of the minutes I buy every month. Why would I want to step backwards to be tied down to a land line (ie: Net connection)? I don't


Valid point, but while land line is less and less usefull, it is still needed. Cell phone technology in US...well to put it delicately, it sucks. Every phone service I have tested had some issues here or there, dropped calls, dead zones, etc. Not a single service (tried TDMA, CDMA, GSM phones, etc) works reliably in my office which is in downtown San Francisco - not exactly middle of nowhere. That verizon dude from their ad is asking if anyone hears him for a reason - because half the time noone can!!! Sometimes I sound just like him. Once you move out of major cities most digital cell services just go dead. Still, I am way off topic. My point is that the modern land line is not competing with the cell service -its augmenting it. I want a land line so that I can get my messages for less personal calls that I do not want to be bothered with. I want my land line so that I can call my family and not pay 35 cents a minute as most cell services charge for overage. I want a land line so that my tivo and directv devices work. I want a land line for my fax machine. There are many reasons people want a land line.

-Em

BTW, I do not work for Vonage, I was just researching them to switch from my local Bell, because once again they ticked me off. So far I think their service is pretty amaizing and everyone I encountered who got the service said it was great.

Re:Not quite the same thing...

[Sethb]

I've got Vonage, and it works pretty well, I'm literally days away from canceling my land line. My wife and I use our cells for most of our calls, but I didn't want to have to eat minutes for incoming calls, hence the Vonage line. I got in before they raised the price though, so my bill is only $20/month for 500 outgoing minutes, unlimited incoming.

Anyhow, the only thing holding me back is my second TiVo upstairs, it wouldn't work over Vonage (though I read some people have gotten it to work) so I'm getting a wireless ethernet bridge to just send it via my 802.11b network. I should really wire the house with cat5e, but I'm lazy, and wireless is oh-so-easy.

But, I use Vonage now all the time, no one has ever griped about the quality, and they'd never know I was using Voice over IP. Things have come a long ways since using Netmeeting on your 486. :)

Re:Not quite the same thing...

[Anonymous Coward]

Canada actually is implementing a universal broadband access plan.

We're doing what now? (Serious, not trolling)

Re:Not quite the same thing...

[Ironica]

I want my land line so that I can call my family and not pay 35 cents a minute as most cell services charge for overage.

And yet, that's why cell phones are becoming more and more the staple rather than the extra: I called my best friend (who lives 500 miles away) and talked for an hour today. I pay $39.99+tax for my cell phone coverage, and it was included. I can call anywhere in the US, from anywhere in the US (that has cell coverage), and it's all rolled up into my 500 anytime + 3500 night/weekend minutes... which I've never come close to exceeding.

If I want to call the pizza place down the street, sure, I'll pick up the landline. But if I want to call someone far away and talk for a while, the cell phone is far more economical.

Re:Not quite the same thing...

[Specter]

I've got Vonage also because we were already spending $40/month in long distance so we figured we'd give it a try.

So far our experience with the company has been great. Contrary to the article the voice quality is excellent the vast majority of the time; usually unless I tell someone they can't tell I'm not calling from a normal land-line. At it's worst the sound quality has still been better than any cell phone on a good day.

I'm actually of two minds about the article mentioning Vonage. On one hand I think the company is great so I want them to sign up lots of new customers and do well. On the other, I fear that as it becomes more popular the ILECs are going to descend on them and I'll find my $40/month phone bill balloned by idiotic regulatory fees.

For instance: my total bill for my $39.99 Vonage service comes out to $41 and some change. My land-line costs just a hair over $21 but after I pay all the taxes and fees my total monthly bill is nearly $36!!!!!

But where do we get Internet access?

[Daniel_Staal]

I like his argument, mostly, but there is one flaw: He assumes the users have internet and will use it for Voice. But where do they get the internet access? The above would be fine, except I can't stand the terms of use for cable in my area (only one cable ISP.), and I have to have Voice (at least local) to get DSL. If I could get just DSL that would be fine, but there is no one who is offering it. So where do I get Internet in his scenario?

Re:But where do we get Internet access?

[RY]

The article states:

Given the choice, an increasing number of customers will simply bypass the phone company and buy the hardware necessary to acquire the service on their own.

The phone companies have made sure that you dont have a choice. You must buy a voice line to get DSL, that is $20 to $40 a month each user is paying just to have the service to have access to DSL at a additional $40 an up cost per month. That is around $80 per household which has DSL, NICE CASH COW. Most terms of service forbid sharing your connection, therfore Legaly you cannot provide service which compeats with the telco.

Until a non telco network (Wide spread interconnected WIFI network) can be built the telcos can bend the customer over and charge any fees they please. The customers have no choice in order to get service to connect to the internet

.

Re:But where do we get Internet access?

[AKnightCowboy]

You must buy a voice line to get DSL, that is $20 to $40 a month each user is paying just to have the service to have access to DSL at a additional $40 an up cost per month.

Everyone has a phone line already anyway though (minus some crazies living in shacks in the hills, but they're not getting DSL either). I don't blame the phone companies for pushing ADSL since SDSL was tying up their copper for something that works just as well over a normal main analog line with filters.

One Assumption too many.

[Chris_Stankowitz]

From the Article:

"The creation of the fax network was the first time this happened, but it won't be the last. WiFi hubs and VoIP adapters allow the users to build out the edges of the network without needing to ask the phone companies for either help or permission. Thanks to the move from analog to digital networks, the telephone companies' most significant competition is now their customers, because if the customer can buy a simple device that makes wireless connectivity or IP phone calls possible, then anything the phone companies offer by way of competition is nothing more than the latest version of ZapMail. "

The entire article makes a lot of assumptions most of which make no sense. But this paragraph being the most ridiculous IMO. There is a reason why products like Lindows is doin well. Mainly the majority of users on the internet don't know how/care to know how or want to do most of these things them selves to get online. This in no way compaers to zapmail. The alterantive was a very easy soloution and it was hardware only. Many people don't want to have to setup hardware and software to get a service. They want it commeing from the OEMs ready to go. The fax machine was a simple matter of pluging it into the wall. WiFi is all that simple (maybe to some). A horrible comparison and overall FUD aimed at Telcos that won't work.

Re:One Assumption too many.

[Em Ellel]

people don't want to have to setup hardware and software to get a service. They want it commeing from the OEMs ready to go. The fax machine was a simple matter of pluging it into the wall. WiFi is all that simple (maybe to some). A horrible comparison and overall FUD aimed at Telcos that won't work.


Actually it IS that simple with newer VoIP offerings. Simply plug into your ethernet connection and connect your analog phone(s) and you are done. you keep you phone number and to end user there is NO difference, just some added features.

Re:One Assumption too many.

[Anonymous Coward]

your spelling and sentence structure make your post really hard to understand.

"WiFi is all that simple (maybe to some)." huh?
"This in no way compaers to zapmail. The alterantive w.." etc.

you could write nearly the same post if you just put the keyboard on the floor and step on it. like this: ;kjfh flkhfasd9[usdaf

Re:One Assumption too many.

[Anonymous Coward]

I understood what he meant. His post made a lot more sense than that article did, thats for sure.

Re:One Assumption too many.

[Maditude]

Actually it IS that simple with newer VoIP offerings. Simply plug into your ethernet connection and connect your analog phone(s) and you are done. you keep you phone number and to end user there is NO difference, just some added features.

Uhmmmm, what if you've already got a NAT'd LAN? Presumably, for anyone to be able to ring your VoIP phone, you'd need to be forwarding a port or two, right? Does it then become a "server" which tends to be frowned upon by most ISP's? And what about the poor bastages who can get DSL/Cable, but the only get private IP addresses from their ISP? Seems to me like it can't possibly be totally idiot-proof...

Re:One Assumption too many.

[noshellswill]

Actually, pad're, in the beginning doing a fax wasn't all that simple. The boxes just didn't work like fingersnaps. More like 2 engineers and a sec and after an hour fluxxing around maybe the fax got received ... maybe not !

Author is drawing a false analogy

[Anonymous Coward]

Zapmail failed because the users were able to sidestep the service provider (FedEx) by connecting directly to the network, for the cost of the fax machine. In essence, FedEx put themselves in as a middleman with zero added value.

The author then states that wireless ISP's are making the same mistake, except that wireless ISP's aren't targeting the home users who can already get cable: They are targetting users where deploying a traditional wireless connect would be impossible, like rural areas, or rest areas where the users don't own the property where they want to use wireless internet.

Also, he makes a similiar mistake with the traditional arguments about the value of VoIP.... except that the telephone monopolies most certainly offer a couple must-have value-added features, such as a centralized telephone number database and the handling of the last-mile wiring + service in one contract.

ZipMail failed because they offered no value as a middleman. This argument doesn't apply to most wireless ISP's or telephone monopolies.

Re:Author is drawing a false analogy

[Call Me Black Cloud]

This isn't exactly true. I worked for FedEx back in the day (the '80s), and while ZapMail didn't last long as a service the machines themselves did remain in service for FedEx for a few years after that (or at least they hung around the office for a few years :) ).

But I digress. ZapMail did have value as a middleman. It was just a service that customers really didn't need. ZapMail machines were more than just fax machines, they were really nice fax machines. These were document quality reproductions at a time when most users were wrestling with rolls of thermal paper. It was more of a document transfer rather than just a copy of the document. But hey, who needed it? People were happy with curling copies because they provided the needed information. Originals could wait a day. So there was value there, it just wasn't worth it (like auto detailing services...sure, there's value in them but not for me...)

That's my take anyway...

Re:Author is drawing a false analogy

[SUB7IME]

Absolutely correct. However, the author's points still hold to some degree, even though his analogy doesn't work properly.

Problems with the analogy

[gpinzone]

I don't disagree with the author's conclusions about ZapMail and the Fax machine. However, there's a key difference between telephone calls through your phone company and voice-over-ip: Internet providers are out to screw their customers as much as the phone companies. Take Optimum Online's self-imposed limit on uploads. They cite P2P traffic, but in reality, wouldn't this put the kabash on Voice-over-IP? Lo and behold, Cablevision is working on it's OWN voice-over-IP solution. Guess if you don't want to cable modem capped, you'll have to pay for TWO services. The difference between the two business plans is that the customers bought fax machines and made an "end-run" around Fed-Ex completely. Try to circumvent the telephone company by pumping VoIP packets through your IP and you may be in for a rude awakening.

Countries ban VoIP

[sapped]

There are a number of countries (I can only think of South Africa as an example right now) that have banned VoIP and are forcing the ISPs to comply.

This has been done purely to protect the phone companies. With enough lobbying that can happen anywhere.

Re:Countries ban VoIP

[ralphclark]

In the UK there are ISPs that do not allow VoIP traffic. It's not legislated for, but it's still in the Terms of Service part of your contract with the ISP. The ISP is probably just honouring constraints forced upon them by the owner of the broadband network infrastructure between your house and the ISP, which is always a telco.

Re:Countries ban VoIP

[Anonymous Coward]

How about putting a ssh connection from one's home to another system that then forwards VoIP from that location, not too unlike say ssh and X.

Re:Countries ban VoIP

[Anonymous Coward]

philippines too.
a cartel to screw the consumers.

The big shift

[outofpaper]

The big shift es going to come as people start to learn that overlaping WiFi nets can work together. As more and more of the networks grow and conect people are not going to nead the last mile any more. With the advent of new WiFi tech people will have the option to get away from neading to use the telecos lines.

Static IPs

[Pinky]

If you're going to call someone over the internet, you need a static ip.. Or a dyndns domain name to route. Your average household connection, right now, if dynamic ip. It makes finding people difficult.

A second problem is the lack of deployment of high speed intenet... or maybe I should say, internet access that can be on 24/7 and not block the phone.

Oddly enough, these problems are the ones that p2p and instant messaging systems tend to get around. INstant messaging will alert you when someone is there and p2p has so many users it doesn't matter who is on, someone always is. Look how well they did.

I do find it funny that companies think users won't share internet accounts for multiple computers and will get two accounts. WiFi or not, I know no one with two i-net accounts for this purpose.

Re:Static IPs

[Stonent1]

Your average household connection, right now, if dynamic ip. It makes finding people difficult.

Why? I don't have problems finding friends on my instant messenger of choice.. I see a voip phone device as a device that connects to a network, and signs in to a service provider. That service provider will, through their means, allow you to talk to POTS phones from your VoIP phone. I don't think that your ip changing will matter, your phone "number" will be owned by them and they will facilitate the connection.

Re:Static IPs

[Lokni]

I have a dynamic IP address for my cable modem but it has not changed in over a year. My ISP (Time Warner) doles out IPs via MAC address. As long as your MAC address stays the same, you will get the same IP address each time.

Re:Static IPs

[Scyber]

I think he was refering to bypassing a VoIP service provider. The Cisco box used by vonage has the ability to connected directly to another cisco box (I believe you use the # as the dot in the IP address), thereby completely ignoring the service provider. For this you need a static IP.

Re:Static IPs

[tomhudson]

So write a script that checks your ip every minute, and, if it changes, posts the changes. I did this yesterday so that we can run our web-based apps and check the webcams at the office, without either a static IP or dynadns service. It just uploads a new page with an updated link to our office server's ip.

If anyone's interested, I'll post the details, or a howto. (You'll need a linux box and perl, 'natch! :-)

Re:Static IPs

[Anonymous Coward]

you need no such thing.

no less then 7 years ago, when your system connected, you transparently logged onto a central database.

no dynamic dns

no static ip

Re:Static IPs

[Stonent1]

Ahh, in that case, I'll just call them on the ph... Well just do what I did. When my isp changed to dhcp, I just statically programmed the first IP I was given. I've had it for 18 months now.

Re:Static IPs

[AKnightCowboy]

DHCP==stupid for cable modem and DSL users. Static IP should be the default for "always on" services like these. What benefit is there by using dynamic IPs? You have X number of DSL/cable customers who are online all the time, why go to the trouble of assigning DHCP addresses and maintaining the database? If you're going to use DHCP then just have static assignments. This is one holdover from dialup ISPs that really drives me nuts. With dialup yes, dynamic assignments make sense since X number of IP addresses in a pool could be assigned to X*10 number of users over the course of a week, etc.

Re:Static IPs

[Anonymous Coward]

for me, static IP is very inflexible. it can lead the restriction that we have had with telco now. should use p2p with PGP. than everyone don't have to rely on having static IP from ISP. they made their own.
i'm sure somebody have serious discussion on this. may point it to me?

--
faizal

Re:Static IPs

[Anonymous Coward]

with PGP, user don't need third party (eg. ICQ, Vonage databse) to identify them. u create your own PGP, u own it.
i might be wrong. :-D

--
faizal

Re:Static IPs

[Anonymous Coward]

can't pump or dhcpd just fire your script if the ip changes when it renew's its lease? sounds much better than polling /proc or cut'n ifconfig...

Re:Static IPs

[mpe]

DHCP==stupid for cable modem and DSL users. Static IP should be the default for "always on" services like these. What benefit is there by using dynamic IPs? You have X number of DSL/cable customers who are online all the time,

Or at least you *could* have every customer connected at once.

If you're going to use DHCP then just have static assignments. This is one holdover from dialup ISPs that really drives me nuts. With dialup yes, dynamic assignments make sense since X number of IP addresses in a pool could be assigned to X*10 number of users over the course of a week, etc.

You can impliment static IP addressing with dialups. Dynamic IP assignment can mean that you need fewer IP addresses than customers.

Re:Static IPs

[tomhudson]

not using dhcpd, so that won't work - though it's a good idea :-( My way works with both dhcp and ppppoe :-)

Business vs. consumer market

[Bookwyrm]

While an interesting article, it would seem to imply that being able to use a FAX machine at, say, Kinko's should not be possible because people would just have bought their own FAX machines. For a business that sends many FAX machines, buying and maintaining their own FAX machine as opposed to using some one else's may make sense. For personal use, it may not be worth the investment. The article does not seem to take that sort of market segmentation into account.

For example, if one assumes that if you use a phone service heavily and that you can provide it for yourself at a cheaper cost for bulk usage, you would. Businesses already do that for themselves with PBX systems (IP-based or not) -- in a sense, what the article is predicting has already happened, but only as far as the heavy users (i.e. businesses) are concerned.

If one assumes the FAX analogy as gospel, then... nothing will really change. Kinko's and other places will provide FAX services to the consumers that cannot afford or are not interested in buying and operating a FAX machine for casual use. Saying that the next generation of VoIP (bah) products will cause people to stop buying services from the phone companies seems likely to follow the same pattern. For the services which are labelled 'too expensive'... how many people actually use those services? Frequently? Enough to justify the expenditure in setting up and running the services on their own? Maybe the services just aren't worth it, whether provided by the phone companies or by one's self -- perhaps that will be the common sense of the consumer, that maybe some of these 'services' offered by the phone companies, or the new next generation ones hyped by VoIP just aren't worth the money.

Re:Business vs. consumer market

[Ironica]

While an interesting article, it would seem to imply that being able to use a FAX machine at, say, Kinko's should not be possible because people would just have bought their own FAX machines. For a business that sends many FAX machines, buying and maintaining their own FAX machine as opposed to using some one else's may make sense. For personal use, it may not be worth the investment. The article does not seem to take that sort of market segmentation into account.

Actually, I think the article was about that kind of market segmentation. What he was picking on ZapMail for, and using it as an example of, is providing a service that is much cheaper to provide at only a small discount over the old service. That means that the end-user finds the service to be even cheaper to provide for themselves.

FedEx Standard Overnight for sending an envelope weighing .1 lbs from the West Coast to the East Coast is $16.48. Kinko's is $2.00 a page (maybe $3 by now) for the same thing, and it gets there about 20 hours earlier. (If I'm just sending it across town, it's only $11.59 by FedEx, and only $1.00 per page by Kinko's... or $0.75 gas money to take it there myself, if I have the time.)

Kinko's is providing the service with a pricing scheme based on the assumption that, if you really thought it was worth it, you'd just buy a fax machine. FedEx wasn't taking that into account as an option; they were only looking at it in comparison to their own existing service, which was (and is) predominantly used by businesses. If they'd marketed it at cheaper rates to the general public, who knows? it might have taken off. But it wasn't the author who didn't realize that, it was the company.

First things first.....

[Dr_Marvin_Monroe]

I agree with the premise of the article, that the phone companies are viewing IP as a service rather than a medium....take the following quote from the article though:

In classic ZapMail fashion, the telephone companies misunderstand the WiFi business. WiFi is a product, not a service, and they assume their competition is limited to other service companies. There are now half a dozen companies selling wireless access points; at the low end, Linksys sells a hundred dollar device for the home that connects to DSL or cable modems, provides wireless access, and has a built-in ethernet hub to boot. The industry has visions of the "2nd phone line" effect coming to data networking, where multi-computer households will have multiple accounts, but if customers can share a high-speed connection among several devices with a single product, the service business will never materialize.

The problem here is how the companies have their service plans written. In most cases (except Speakeasy I believe), it's expressly forbidden to share your connection with anyone!...Call this an "anti-terrorism" move or just simple protection of their markets. Either way, they have legislated their own protection.

If you have broadband, please examine your "acceptable use policy" for this type of language. With the pending handout to the phone companies (so that they can keep up with the Jones' over in the cable camp), I expect even further clamping of total bandwidth, types of bandwidth (i.e. peer-2-peer) and how you may use what's left.

That's where FedEx didn't have control...If they could have gone to Washington with the idea that "FAX owners are possible terrorists," they could have blocked the individual ownership of FAX machines through legislation...and ZapMail might be all we know now! FedEx also didn't have control of what the public can attach to their phone circuits....the phone company does have some level of control over that.

Simply put, the phone companies are in a much stronger position to protect their markets with anti-competitive language and policies. I don't expect them to "go easily into that good night." I expect that there will be quite a struggle coming up....expect all the legal manuvers, engineered incompatabilities and FUD that we've seen from the RIAA/MPAA and more.....They didn't get to be monopolies by being nice, they'll do whatever it takes to maintain that position.

Re:First things first.....

[richieb]

The problem here is how the companies have their service plans written. In most cases (except Speakeasy I believe), it's expressly forbidden to share your connection with anyone!..

But this is a silly requirement that the customers will. If the cable companies take action there will be quite an outcry...

Re:First things first.....

[alienw]

WTF are you talking about? First, the ISPs didn't legislate anything - the restriction is in the contract you signed. Second, they prohibit sharing your line with people OUTSIDE your household, not with multiple devices. Third, what the hell does terrorism, the RIAA and the MPAA have to do with telephone service?

How about you read your post before posting it next time? It makes no sense whatsoever.

missing a point

[Styros]

The problem that faced Zapmail doesn't translate here. Zapmail failed because Fed Ex didn't own the underlying technology behind it, the telephone wires. Fed Ex had to buy the technology, the line and the fax machine, just like its customers. That's why the pricing never made sense, since nobody would pay the Fed Ex premium when they could go directly to the source.

That analogy doesn't work here, because the telcos own the underlying technology. Once they bundle phone and internet together, you have both no matter what. Sure, you can cancel the phone, but why, you've already paid for it.

Take my case for example, I can only get SBC DSL here. I don't like SBC's phone service, so I want to quit. Well, that's too bad for me, because I can't. In order for my DSL to work, I have to have SBC phone service. Since, I can't get a cable modem, I'm stuck with the service.

Re:missing a point

[non-poster]

That analogy doesn't work here, because the telcos own the underlying technology.

Ah, but if enough consumers bought a device that implemented a wireless mesh network, enough to saturate an area so everybody is "connected", the telcos would be removed from the per-consumer connection point. I almost said "would not own the underlying technology", but that would be wrong since they still own the fiber, etc., that makes up the internet. The telcos would just need to have a scattering of wireless-to-backbone points in the saturation area.

You could make phone calls to people in your neighborhood without going through the phone company... You could share files with your friend down the street at high speeds...

It would not be difficult to make a wifi access point-type device into this mesh network device. It's just software at this point...

Re:missing a point

[Anonymous Coward]

FedEx created the Fax Machine, and owned the original patent. So they did "own" the original technology behind it.

Re:missing a point

[Anonymous Coward]

Thats bullshit. This service came out in like 1984. Fax machines had been around for at least ten years before that.

End-to-end optical wavelengths

[persaud]

At a US Dept. of Energy 08/02 workshop on High Performance Network Planning, Bill St. Arnaud gave a presentation on CA*Net4, the Canadian optical research network where "... Universities and researchers own and control their own lightpath wavelengths and _associated cross connects on each switch_."

Topology:

• a network of point-to-point "condominium" wavelengths
• condo owners can recursively partition their wavelengths
• wavelength owners determine topology and routing of their light paths
• massive edge peering, "star bursts" vs. "ring of rings"
• not "distributed network objects", but "distributed object networks"

Customer oriented end-to-end model:

• customer owns infrastructure, carrier provides network management
• asset-based telecom allows customers to fund and control the network
• customer controls the bandwidth

Details:

• DoE presentation (2mb pdf)
• 3rd-gen optical network, CANet*3
• Further reading

Re:So get up get, get get down, 911 is a joke in V

[Scyber]

I keep seeing people saying this as being a stumbling block to voip. I don't really understand though, is not having 911 that big of a deal? The town I grew up in didn't have it till the mid 90s and we managed to survive OK. Also, unless I am mistaken, 911 is typically linked to a regular local number. So you can just program that number into a speed dial function of your phone. While the 911 operator won't be able to pull up an address, the same is true of cell phones and I know plenty of people that have replaced their land lines with cells.

For now, telco owns the "last mile".....

[Newer Guy]

For now, someone (telco, cable company, etc.) owns the 'last mile' of the circuit. My ISP tells me that about 2/3 of my monthly DSL bill goes direct to the ILEC (telco). They get 1/3 to fill the line with Internet. That means that they get 17 bucks a month out of the 50 and the telco gets 34 just for providing the last mile. To add insult to injury, to get ADSL I must also have an analog telephone line, (at 20 bucks a month) which means that the telco actually gets paid TWICE for the last mile.

It seems to me that the telco's are committing highway robbery. They're getting over 50 bucks a month for providing a single copper pair about five blocks. Cable's pricing is no better, and all the cable companies are capping upload limits which limits your ability to use VOIP (the reason is clear here too; cable wants to charge you for THEIR OWN VOIP).

Seems to me that a community could make a small fortune by running fiber and charging even half what the telco's and cable companies charge for that last mile.

Finally, I have Vonage VOIP service. Had it for over a year now and I love it. I use it with DSL.
My wife talks to her mother over 10 hours a week. I call all my friends and my kids constantly. The bill is always the same: 39.99 plus tax. Also, their international calls sound better then AT&T and you can't beat calling most of Europe for 5 cents a minute. Plus it's great having a 617 (downtown Boston) incoming phone number that is a local call for all my friends there, yet rings at my condo in Los Angeles.

Re:For now, telco owns the "last mile".....

[stilwebm]

When you use Vonage, how is the delay? I noticed when using AT&T in some parts of Europe, the dalay was quite signifcant and cause that aweful echoing effect. Amost the same exactly effect occurred when I used Dialpad over DSL. I imagine the Vonage box helps limit some of the delays, but IP latency still seems to be a problem.

Re:For now, telco owns the "last mile".....

[Nynaeve]

Seems to me that a community could make a small fortune by running fiber and charging even half what the telco's and cable companies charge for that last mile.

That's exactly what Chickasaw Telecommunications Services, Inc. did for Stillwater, OK.

The city gave them permission to string their fiber along the electric poles, thus avoiding costly digging. These guys are way cool, and there is even a little box in my backyard labelled "fiber". I think it actually means that it connects to fiber, not that it is fiber because the big fiber concentrator thingy (I forget the actual term) is literally just a stone's throw from my house.

I only subscribe to their 256k service ($29/mo), but they give all of their customers a VDSL modem (a standard capable of 57 Mbps, although they only offer 6Mbps max AFAIK) for future expansion. They install the modem on your spare wire pair instead of sharing the voice line like SBC (read: no silly ADSL filters).
As a result, we have three main Internet providers in Stillwater, a city with a population of about 18,000 (not counting 22,000 students): SBC, Cox High Speed Internet (cable), and Chickasaw
Competiton is a good thing!

Re:For now, telco owns the "last mile".....

[praedor]

Such stuff is great for middle-to-large sized city dwellers. I am rural folk near a small-sized city in Indiana. There is NO broadband in my area except for satellite. Think DSL is overpriced given that the phone company is essentially charging twice for the same line with a truly cheap extra addon to make DSL work? Try satellite. It costs more for satellite than for DSL or cable, but since most rural USA residents have no option BUT satellite if they want broadband...

I have been mulling over the possibilities of shoving it up the telcos (and cable company's arse) by becoming an end-run ISP. I want broadband CHEAPER than anyone else offers it and I would like to offer it to neighbors/my local community for cheaper than telcos or cable or satellite. Problem is, being a rural area, the potential customers are dispersed over a wide area and not necessarily up there on the economic scale. Farmers and manufacturing types. I want to completely sidestep the telco and install a T1 and then offer access to the community at a little over cost (to bring an income to me and help me maintain/upgrade service, etc). Unfortunately, I just don't see a large enough real customer base here to really make it feasible. Thus, we out here are stuck indefinitely with telcos and dialup internet. There is no competition and no drive to spread broadband to the people. You have to move to Canada or Europe to see a real drive to offer broadband to the citizenry.

Re:For now, telco owns the "last mile".....

[Anonymous Coward]

The ISP's price of $34 is a steal! I wish Hell$outh would charge us that little for our DSL lines. The price we pay for getting the DSL line to a space we have to rent in the CO (central office) is about $80 a month. We also have to buy expensive equipment to handle the DSL lines (lease is about $1,400 per month). In addition to that, we have an ATM connection (about $6K per month) from Hell$outh to get the data to our office from *each* CO. Then, we have to pay for Internet bandwidth. We sell 256Kbps for $150 per month and lose money. BellSouth sells the same for $119. I wish we only paid $34 per month for DSL lines! We could sell the **** out of them or either afford to offer much better service.

>Seems to me that a community could make a small
>fortune by running fiber

The problem is that it costs a large fortune to run the fiber! The few fiber runs we've done were nightmares. Dealing with the cities is a complete pain. Most of the downtown area we are located in and most of the newer neighborhoods around here have underground service. You have to dig to add cabling. On the few runs we did, we had several people complain to the city council about digging-up their yards. We also had to do most of the work under the streets at night (costs about 4x as much!). After cost of labor, suing the city to get permission to install the fiber, the fiber, and the equipment on each end, we could have paid for a T3 for a couple of years. Yes, we make-up the difference after two years, but it's a huge risk to take for the expected return. This was for big pipes. For smaller ones, I don't see where you could even afford to make lease payments on the equipment or pay interest on the installation of the fiber much less make profit.

Live in China, but have a 310 US area code

[silentbozo]

It looks like the Vonage boxes have the direct dial number tied to the box. It's like a mobile phone in that respect, except the boxes hook onto a public infrastructure (TCP/IP), which means you can pay $40 to Vonage to have a phone number in the 310 area code (Los Angeles), even though you might physically be in some place like China (assuming you have broadband there.)

You could put together a DIY call center on the cheap - get a business number, have it set to forward to a set of 310 numbers, get a dozen Vonage boxes, put them in some place where labor and broadband are cheap (someplace in midwest Canada?), and there ya go! Local customer calls 310 number, local teleco forwards to the Vonage number, Vonage rings the box, which is NOT in LA, and there ya go!

Hmmm, even cooler. Take the box with you on vacation - as long as you can get TCP/IP, you won't have to mess with phone or message forwarding. Damn, this is one way to have a portable number, even if the local telco won't let you have one (even though by state law they're supposed to!!!)

Re:Live in China, but have a 310 US area code

[Jester99]

...this is one way to have a portable number...

It's a shame that someone can't invent some sort of mobile telephone device... whereby you take a small telephone and use "radio waves" or somesuch to connect to other phones.. erm. heh. :)

Ring the box, even if you aren't a Vonage customer

[silentbozo]

Anyone know if it is possible to call a Vonage box without going through Vonage? I don't mean call on a regular telephone and connect to the Vonage box, I mean call from a generic non-Vonage MTA to a Vonage-labled MTA. I'm envisoning a system where one person gets a Vonage MTA, and you put wi-fi extensions off of it (like a party line) and share that TCP/IP to regular POTS tunnel with an entire neighborhood (in the same way you would share broadband access.) People within the neighborhood would call each other for free, without each having to pay to subscribe to Vonage. If the MTA supported it, you might even be able to program one number, but have it forward to different extensions - a way of getting business service, without having to pay business prices.

Re:So get up get, get get down, 911 is a joke in V

[stratjakt]

I work writing/maintaining software for public service, including CAD (computer aided dispatching) systems. So I pretty much set up 911 systems from the police's end, and pretty much everywhere it's run at a municipal level. No 3-letter gov't agency need be involved, the 911 service is contracted between the city/county and the provider.

So there's really nothing stopping a city from contracting an emergency service from a company like Vontage - all that needs happen is someone like me codes the interface to it.

It is, however, unlikely. Agencies loathe change. They don't want to upgrade. Right now they're all pitching a fit because HP is phasing out the 3000 line over the next 10 years - they dont plan on buying new hardware before then. So I doubt we'd see any citys/counties signing a contract with a 'new kid on the block' .com company.

Heck, my company is only 20 years old and it takes a lot of shmoozing (and vaporware promises from marketing that I have to keep - grr) to get in the door. They'd rather shell out the big dollars to a company like Motorola for vastly inferior software and support, because they know Motorola will be there in 30 years when they decide to upgrade the system.

They're a decidedly technophobic bunch. You'd be surprised to see how many agencies in sizable cities still do their dispatching via cue cards and a bulletin board.

Re:So get up get, get get down, 911 is a joke in V

[Em Ellel]

I keep seeing people saying this as being a stumbling block to voip. I don't really understand though, is not having 911 that big of a deal? The town I grew up in didn't have it till the mid 90s and we managed to survive OK. Also, unless I am mistaken, 911 is typically linked to a regular local number. So you can just program that number into a speed dial function of your phone. While the 911 operator won't be able to pull up an address, the same is true of cell phones and I know plenty of people that have replaced their land lines with cells.


Why can't VoIP service operator give it's info to 911 same as the bell does?

And BTW, the new cell phones are now getting the "E911" service, that will triangulate your signal if you dial 911.

-Em

My would-be "Ask Slashdot"

[RevDobbs]

This article is great, and I'm going to show it to my boss as a way of explaining a product that we are being offered by a company called NorVergence, which taps into your PBX and routs calls over there network, instead of the TDM network.

Now, for my question... has anyone ever delt with NorVergence? My web searches have turned up mostly just press releases, I can't find any "customer reviews", positive or negative. If we sign up for their service, what can we expect?

Re:Ring the box, even if you aren't a Vonage custo

[Em Ellel]

Not sure but I bet you they can (and you probably do not need ANYONE with Vonage access), but WHY? They still will not be able to call anyone outside their local network without getting a service from Vonage or someone like that.

-Em

Re:So get up get, get get down, 911 is a joke in V

[Anonymous Coward]

The true worries are that:
a.) the user of a "phone" can't be located (this is being solved using triangulation or GPS with cellular, but doing a network audit to find the ethernet port someone is plugged into doesn't make sense in the wireline world)
and b.) The phone won't necessarily have power in an emergency situation. Today's phones (aside from cordless) are powered from the CO and hence a power outage in the customer premise doesn't cut off the customer calling for help.

As well, Tell me how it makes sense for any more than say 5-10% of the population (really... what's broadband penetration at?)to go out and plunk down $40-50 US (us Canucks don't pay as much... :P ) then pay someone like Vonage (who serves relatively small pockets of the US thus far (at least if you want your number to be local...) another $40 smackers!

Right.. if I'm grandma, uncle Ted, or mom&dad I'll stick with my $30 Baby Bell line...

To those "Not Possible" Replies

[bahwi]

I'm sure I'll have inaccuracies in this also.

Alot of people are saying that this just isn't possible. Some don't like cable and others say you have to get voice with DSL.

The article, however, was a kind of "What may happen in the future/What is happening now" not a "This is what is happening here and now and here's what we can do."

VoIP is a very real possibility, just not yet. In the future, we will be able to get DSL sans Voice. You have to look at this from the 'as the world turns' way instead of the 'status quo' way. If broadband was inexpensive(they way it is moving to, believe it or not!) and you can go to Wal Mart, buy a "VoIP/WiFi Starter Box" which gives you a wireless hub and a WiFi phone with a charging station, I believe VoIP would become much more popular than regular telephone.

If you think that the phone companies keeping an incompatability between VoIP and 'land lines'(VoIP disguised as regular phones) then you're wrong. Many people will switch to both. I don't believe that E-Mail will replace the phone (although it would be nice =). Instant Messaging is used as much or sometimes more than the telephone, so it is a real competitor, same with e-mail vs. IM. I do not believe that Instant Messaging will replace E-Mail, nor Telephone. Nor do I believe that MSN Messenger or Yahoo! Pager will replace AIM. Those are easy choices to make whereas Telephone is not.

Internet Service is poised to move to be the 'hard choice' because you can always unplug the VoIP or turn off AIM. I think the traditional phone services will be replaced by online directories for looking up people, calculating their current IP(back-end stuff, end-users won't see this), and show whether they are at home or not.

ILECs vs LD carriers

[cshirky]

Two points:

First, the "big boys" you name are not the incumbent local exchanges, or ILECs, like SBC, BellSouth and Verizon. The article, written for the general reader, glosses over the difference between local and long-distance service, but its the ILECs who have the most to lose from Vonage et al, because the ILECs are the ones who make their money locking out competition and locking in service fees for things like Call Waiting that VoIP can do for free.

Second, the move from Column A (per-minute fees on a voice-optimized network) to Column B (voice as just another flat-rate app on an IP-based data network) is more than just bookkeeping, because you get to charge a lot less for apps in Column B. If all of ATTs LD revenues were to switch to VoIP style pricing tomorrow, they'd be out of business by the weekend.

-clay

Re:Can I dial a static IP using VOIP?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes.

A few FedEx details

[Anonymous Coward]

While the article makes some reasonable points about the ZapMail / personal fax machine 'competition' as usual there are a few details that fill out the picture (and maybe make it a little more interesting).

- FedEx's 'fax machines' were 300x300dpi devices. This was important because a signed document could be sent that would still contain a legal signature. Keep a 1986 perspective on this (with very few fax machines anywhere during planning much less laser printer quality)

- A communications satellite was part of the network (so much for not owning the network as some have said). Problem is, it was on the Challenger. Not only was the satellite lost, so was the launch system for an indefinite period.

- The tax laws were scheduled to change in 1988 (?) to change that would reduce how much FedEx could write off in the case of a project cancellation. With no launch capability, it probably was reasonable to shutdown sooner rather than later and get the best writeoff possible.

- Lots of Tandem systems were purchased to support Zapmail. Most of these are still in operation in the FedEx network. Also, for a long time Zapmail hardware was used internally as copy machines... (oh, that old thing - its a Zapmail leftover...)

- FedEx hired a lot of IT people around the Zapmail time (mid 80's) and many are the old hands of today. By the way, FedEx laid off ZERO personnel when Zapmail was cancelled even though reported from 1500 to 2500 were involved. All were reassigned and a large number played significant IT roles later in the evolution of the FedEx network to what it is now. Many even referred to themselves as being 'Zapmailers'.

If a few things had gone differently, the project might of at least been launched and operational for a while. There's little doubt that the Zapmailers did not understand how much the common fax machine would spread, but what would have been launched would still be in its own 'league' even now.

Re:A few FedEx details

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a very clear memory of FedEx attempting to sell my company on the ZapMail concept. It was too expensive (considerably more than overnite delivery IIRC) to send a page from point A to point B because of the number of people involved in scanning, printing, packaging, and delivering. Plus there was no guarantee of privacy because of the extensive handling. At the time FedEx was attempting to get the idea moving, the business world was investing in fax machines and corporate networks and wasn't interested in paying FedEx a ton of money for something they could do themselves. ZapMail was not simply a good idea at the wrong time, it was a bad idea from the beginning. I've always been curious if anybody inside FedEx ever tried to tell Fred Smith that it wouldn't work.

Re:A few FedEx details

[Anonymous Coward]

'Urban legend' says someone did just that (and received his reward). Dennis Jones was the CIO of FedEx from around 1992 to 1997 but started out in the finance section. What helped him move to the CIO spot? Report is he was one of the only ones who walked into Fred's office (while doing the finance gig) and told him it wasn't going to work and the plug had to be pulled.

Mr. Jones later claim to fame? Working with Fred to get a web site up that actually did something in 1994 (i.e. track packages...)

FedEx did own the infrastructure, actually

[cshirky]

I didn't want to make the article too much of a trip down memory lane about ZapMail, but in fact FedEx _did_ own the underlying technology. They built a proprietary data network to support the service. It was the owners of fax machines who didn't own the underlying technology.

And the bundling of DSL and phone doesn't keep you from keeping the phone for POTS/911 service and moving everything else to VoIP. Unless you have the bare minimum phone service and no LD charges, this may well be a cost-saving option.

-clay

911...

[aquarian]

As is coming with wireless phones, there's no reason GPS technology couldn't be employed to solve this problem. All that's needed is for someone to provide that service or software -- resolving GPS coordinates to addresses.

The fax machine used to be difficult as well

[cshirky]

You're comapring apples and oranges. Don't think that today's Type 3 plain-paper "just plug it in and it works" fax was like the fax machines of 1984. Those fax machines costs thousands of dollars, had poor quality, were difficult to set up, and required lots of maintenance for their toner replacements and special fax-only paper.

The reason we have easy to use cheap fax machines today is that there was a market for difficult expensive ones 15 years ago. The same thing happened with radios, calculators, and, of course, computers.

Today's VoIP and WiFi installations are cheaper and easier than they used to be, and will be both cheaper and easier again by the end of this year. Comparing a mature technology with one still in early adoption phase, and concluding that the latter has no chance, is to mistake the acorn for the oak.

-clay

Re:The fax machine used to be difficult as well

[5KindsOfSalmon]

"Comparing a mature technology with one still in early adoption phase, and concluding that the latter has no chance, is to mistake the acorn for the oak."

In fact it is you who is perhaps guilty of 'mistaking the acorn for the oak'. It's clear from context that you meant to end your sentence differently, perhaps with "...is to forget that the mightiest oak was once an acorn." (admittedly a little flowery, but bear with me.)

But your malapropism, as it turns out, may be quite illuminating. It just so happens that only about 1 in 10,000 acorns ever grows into an Oak, mighty or otherwise [1]. To see in every nascent technology the seeds of greatness is to ignore the full-to-overflowing dustbin of history to which so many promising ideas are sadly consigned.

Don't get me wrong--I remain hopeful that VOIP can help smash the telco monopolies, but as others here have noted, the powers that be aren't taking any of this lying down. The restrictions on 'servers' in many TOS's are only the first line of defense that will need to be breached before we see real success. As has been noted by others here, one of the key difference between the dawn of fax and that of VOIP is that the phone companies were more than happy to have their customers sign up for extra fax lines and use their new gadgets to make long-distance calls. And there wasn't much FedEx could do about it. Contrast with the current situation, where broadband ISPs in many markets *are* the telcos who stand to suffer, and you see how you have opened yourself up to charges of observation bias.

You are not alone in your eternal hope, of course. A quick Google of 'poem mighty-oak acorn' should convince you of that.

[1] http://www.leo.lehigh.edu/projects/sam/trivia.html

IPoV

[cmburns69]

But when can we get reliable IPoV?!

A Starcraft RPG? Only at

Re:IPoV

[autocracy]

Modem?

Re:IPoV

[WetCat]

Hehe! What about wireless voice connection:
two large acoustic system in A and B and a microphones on the other end. (Or spy electronic ears) And that will be loud! You'll be able to HEAR your IP Packets
8-0

Re:IPoV

[Anonymous Coward]

answer: the 1970s. check out these cool "modem" things.

ok, technically that's ip over ppp over voice...

Phone number - Dynamic IP is the lookup

[cshirky]

You don't need a static IP if you have a static phone number. Once Vonage gives you a phone number, it keeps that at the permanent entry in its db, matching your phone's dynamic IP to that phone number on the fly.

This is the ICQ model, where the IP address is treated as the temporary half of a permanent->temporary lookup table. This is one of the big wins for this version of VoIP.

-clay

Can you blame them?

[Goonie]

If a new system has bugs, people can (and sometimes do) die. This tends to be a pretty powerful incentive to keep an old, working system going.

We had this in Victoria (Australia) when ambulance dispatch was contracted out to Intergraph (who you may remember as a graphics card manufacturer). The inevitable teething problems occurred, a few people died, the government ended up in very hot water.

Re:Can you blame them?

[blibbleblobble]

"If a new system has bugs, people can (and sometimes do) die. This tends to be a pretty powerful incentive to keep an old, working system going."

So why do ambulances use the same roads as regular commuter traffic? Sometimes, practicality and convenience dictate that mission-critical systems need to use the same off-the-shelf technology that the rest of business is using.

Jane Black article predated Shirky's

[SiliconEntity]

Jane Black wrote an article making a similar analysis in BusinessWeek Online a few weeks ago. She discussed commercial WiFi companies like Cometa and brought up the example of FedEx's ZapMail to illustrate that commercial WiFi could face the same failure. Some quotes:

When fax machines were first introduced in the 1980s, several big companies planned new fax-delivery services. In 1984, visionary FedEx CEO Frederick Smith introduced a service called ZapMail that he hoped would replace jet fuel with ink toner. The plan: FedEx would buy the then-pricey fax machines and place them in every FedEx office. Customers who wanted to send a fax would have FedEx pick up their documents and bring them to a local office. Within the hour, the documents would then be faxed to the FedEx office closest to the recipient. FedEx would put the fax in an envelope and hand-deliver the service.

At the time, it made sense. ZapMail began as a value-added service that leveraged FedEx's core strength--reliably delivering information overnight. It also saved customers the trouble of installing and maintaining expensive equipment. But ZapMail ultimately failed as the price of fax machines plummeted. Rather than pay someone else to send a fax, businesses just bought their own machines. FedEx shuttered ZapMail only 12 months after the launch--and $190 million in losses.

ZapMail may prove a cautionary tale for Cometa. Right now, Wi-Fi seems like a new, whiz-bang technology that requires corporate oversight. But in time, business users and individuals may not see the need to pay someone for Wi-Fi service. After all, bandwidth is sold at a flat monthly rate. That means there's no cost difference to a hotel, restaurant, or public park if 1,000 or 100,000 people log on to their network.

"This is a corporate land grab. Ultimately, though, users may realize they can make this work on their own," predicts Dewayne Hendricks, CEO of the California-based Dandin Group, which promotes wireless technology in remote areas. That would be good news for Wi-Fi. But bad news for Cometa.

Let's give Ms. Black credit for coming up with the ZapMail analogy first. Shirky may have thought of it on his own, or he may have borrowed consciously or unconsciously from this earlier article.

Don't need Broadband or Static IPs

[unix guy]

I don't know where most of the posters get their information, but we amateur radio operators (hams) have been doing VoIP for quite a while, over dialup and without static IPs - and we talk anywhere in the world to any other connected user. Check out http://www.eqso.org and http://www.synergenics.com for excellent software.

Why VOIP 911 Has Problems, and How To Fix Them

[billstewart]

Residential 911 is relatively easy - the phone company installed your phone at your house and knows where it is, so they can program the 911 computer to know that the call from +1-202-456-2121 is from 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Cellphone 911 is obviously hard - the phone can be almost anywhere, and the easiest thing the phone company can tell is that it's near the cell site it's using now; some digital cell phone standards can do a reasonable job of triangulation on distances to multiple cell towers to figure out locations. At least the wireless people have some clue.

For VOIP, though, the way the phone call reaches the phone company is that somebody has a box that translates between phone lines (usually T1 trunks) and IP addresses, so the only thing the phone company knows is that it got a call from 202-456-2121, which terminates on a box in the basement at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. PBXs already cause some trouble with this, but they're often bright enough to know that the call is from extension 1234, and somebody can run a database that knows that x1234 is on the 12th floor. With VOIP, it's even worse - the VOIP-to-POTS gateway is some router or PBX that knows it got a connection from 10.32.11.1, and it's possible that somebody has a database that shows that that address belongs to a DHCP server on the 12th floor, not that the 911-police know how to find your data network management staff in a hurry, but in most of the VOIP standards, there's really no information beyond the IP address.

And of course your IP address might be anywhere in the world - did you dial in today from home, or a hotel, or an airplane, or your corporate office 3000 miles away? And think about the VOIP phones themselves - some people use telephone-oriented software applications on their PCs (it's 10.01.01.23 - do you know where your laptop is?), while other people use desktop VOIP phones from a variety of vendors, which you program to know that you're Linus Torvalds on +1-202-456-2121, and if you plug them in anywhere in your company's network, they'll find the gateway server, let it know your current IP address, and be ready to pick up your voicemail and incoming phone calls. Anywhere. So if you dial 911, the town your company's main office is in knows that there's an emergency somewhere near you, but it doesn't know where you are. And if you're not using a coporate VOIP system, you could really be almost anywhere. And if you're going through a NAT firewall or VPN gateway, you could be even farther anywhere.

So what kinds of approaches can people take to fix this? The two obvious first steps are either to get the phone company out of the way (give the 911 people VOIP so they can at least try to traceroute you, though that still has all the IP-vs-location uncertainties), or else to make sure that the VOIP standards are updated to do a better job of passing location information (for people who want to pass it) and that the VOIP-to-POTS gateway standards provide some mechanism for passing that along, whether it's starting the call with a 300-baud beepstream or using a separate internet or modem channel to pass on the VOIP as packets rather than translating to audio. That's still not enough - your laptop or portable voip phone only knows what you've told it, and unless GPS becomes much much cheaper, lower electric power, and better at working inside, it's can't use GPS to find out for itself.

Somebody could develop standards and implementations for some kind of where-am-I beacon, which probably would be better to run on a router but could be run on a PC, which you could program with your location, so a device can check with the net to get at least some advice about where it's located physically, though obviously that information could be misadministered or forged or just blinking 12:00. And if there's more than one of them that you can see, obviously you'd want some kind of decision-making process to find the closer one....

Then there's the whole privacy issue. Usually if you're making a 911 call, you probably want the police to be able to find you. But not always, and you certainly wouldn't want them to be able to find you when you haven't asked....

Re:Why VOIP 911 Has Problems, and How To Fix Them

[Em Ellel]

Interesting read, but there is actually a much more basic problem with VoIP 911 calling - WHICH 911 to call? 911 is NOT a single entity. Calling 911 on your land line and your cell phone will probably route you to completely different locations.(When I needed 911, cell phone took me to Highway Patrol, where land line took me to a local call center)

Aside from that, I do not think it is that complicated if you assume that 911 location identification is not big brother imposition but something consumer actually wants. Portability is not the most usefull feature of VoIP phones. Cell phones are much more usefull for that. Most people will use VoIP in a static location, portability being usefull only when they move. Keeping that in mind, you can store a "911" profile with the VoIP provider (can use billing info by default)that gets sent to 911 operator when you call. Heck, it can be sent in the CallerID string which would require no new programming on 911 call center part (and only a little for special case on VoIP provider's part.)
This also takes care of privacy nuts, as it allows you to control what gets sent to 911 center. It can also be determined from profile which 911 center to contact.

-Em

Re:Why VOIP 911 Has Problems, and How To Fix Them

[Synn]

"Somebody could develop standards and implementations for some kind of where-am-I beacon"

Hello emergency? I live at xxx xxx xxx...

People did that for 60+ years and it seemed to work okay.

Re:Why VOIP 911 Has Problems, and How To Fix Them

[Ironica]

or else to make sure that the VOIP standards are updated to do a better job of passing location information (for people who want to pass it)

Actually, you hit the nail on the head there. It's not legal to block your phone number from 911 (or from toll-free numbers, because they're picking up the tab). If VOIP is to take off, the same standards need to be applied to it for residential telephone service.

Re:Why VOIP 911 Has Problems, and How To Fix Them

[adrianbye]

There's some geolocation software out there for ip addresses - maxmind.com is one. Although their level of accuracy isn't good enough yet, I think they can only do zipcodes so far.

Re:Why VOIP 911 Has Problems, and How To Fix Them

[LostCluster]

Of course, what we could do is simply turn back the clock to the mid-80s before 911 existed...

Back then, police and fire departments had "normal" phone numbers, and had to make an effort to distribute magnets and paint the numbers onto their vehicles. It wasn't quite as easy to memorize as 911, but many phones with autodial came with 1-touch buttons labeled with police, fire, and medical symbols. (Then came the laws about not testing those one-touch buttons...)

Re:Why VOIP 911 Has Problems, and How To Fix Them

[cyberformer]

The police can always find you when you call 911 from a regular phone. The database at the 911 call center displays your exact address at the instant the phone rings, regardless of whether you're unlisted or blocking caller ID.

It's the same with cell phones, only less accurate of course. Some allow users to turn off the more advanced GPS-type features, so that the phone company isn't tracking them everywhere they go, but the feature will be reactivated automatically when they dial 911.

Re:Why VOIP 911 Has Problems, and How To Fix Them

[madfgurtbn]

If VOIP is to take off, the same standards need to be applied to it for residential telephone service.

But isn't this exactly the opposite of the point of the article? The article even includes a quote that mirrors your statement:

Telcos gain billions in service fees from [...] services like Call Forwarding and Call Waiting [...]. Hence, capex programs that shift a telco, say, from TDM to IP, as in a softswitch approach that might have less capital intensity, must absolutely preserve the revenue stream. [ http://www.proberesearch.com/alerts/refocusing.htm ]

VoIP is fundamentally different than what we currently think of as a telephone. We shouldn't try to fit it into the same box.

911 is one feature of telephones. It worked becaue a telephone was attached to a certain place. It improved emergency vehicle response time. Cell phones don't work well with 911, either, but emergency vehicle response time is far better now because when there is an accident there are usually people on the scene within seconds who can immediately contact 911 dispatch without having to find a friendly farmhouse, etc.

VoIP will eventually do the same thing, but more so.

Re:Why VOIP 911 Has Problems, and How To Fix Them

[Rob Parkhill]

The problem is, you might not even get the right 911 centre when you dial 911 on a VoIP phone (not that you can even dial 911 from a VoIP system right now, but assuming you could...) Let's say that 99% of the time you are in Chicago, and you use your VoIP phone there. The system could be programmed to dial the Chicago emergency responce centre when you dial 911. But you need to go on a business trip, and you take your VoIP phone with you. You VPN back to your home system, and dial 911. Now your sitting in Tampa Bay, and 911 still reaches the Chicago 911, when it should hit the Tampa 911. telling Chicago 911 that you are at location X in Florida isn't going to do much good.

With a cell phone, you get connected to 911 for whatever region you are making the call from. With VoIP, there really isn't (yet) a way to know where you are calling from.

Re:Why VOIP 911 Has Problems, and How To Fix Them

[billstewart]

Cell phones, except possibly a few new ones, don't _have_ GPS-type features. GPS technology is getting smaller and lower in power consumption, but still takes too much space and power for a small phone. What actually goes on is that cell phones talk to cell antenna towers so that they've always got the best signal they can get, and this lets them locate you because (in the dumb version) the system knows what cell site you're using, and (in the newer smarter versions) the nearest N cell sites know you're nearby so they can triangulate. If you turn the phone off, and then turn it on again, it sends out a broadcast letting the system know it's there.

Re:Why VOIP 911 Has Problems, and How To Fix Them

[Mr. Slippery]

Hello emergency? I live at xxx xxx xxx...

People did that for 60+ years and it seemed to work okay.

Well, yes, but not nearly as well as modern 911's automatic tracing, which gets you help even if you're on the verge of unconsciousness, or are calling from a payphone or someone else's house that you don't know the address of, or can't say where you are because if you talk the ax murderer who just broke into your house will here you.

Member-owned cooperative

[core plexus]

That's what my telephone and DSL are, member owned cooperatives. We are always fending off buy-out offers from nearby commercial-corporate phone companies, but it won't happen. Our electric company is also a member-owned cooperative. I got a check from the phone company last week, my share of the dividend. I wouldn't have it any other way.

Over-exposed schoolgirl victim of high-tech bullying See what trouble camera cell-phones can be?

Re:Member-owned cooperative

[Eminence]

Interesting - could you write something more about how it is possible to set up such a cooperative?

Re:Member-owned cooperative

[core plexus]

I'd be glad to. Where shall I post it? This may be all you need to get started, though. on google.

Many people don't realize how many members there are for these cooperatives. It's surprising.

That's Just a Burglar Alarm -- Ignore It!

He's talking about phone switches

[Anonymous Coward]

These aren't switches in the ISO Protocol Stack sense handling IP packets - these are Phone Switches that dynamically build an end-to-end circuit, flow bits over it, and close down the circuit when the call is done. The call setup signals may be doing things at layers 3, 4, and 7, but the action they control is at Layer 1.

Re:He's talking about phone switches

[billstewart]

On the other hand, there are a number of international carriers starting to use VOIP, because it makes it convenient to use compression and save a lot of bandiwidth in spite of the IP packet overhead, plus of course the Net2Phone-type-people do VOIP.

One problem is...

[hackwrench]

that everything is designed to disallow "backdoor connections" making everything run through a backbone, and it is at this backbone where there is no competition.

And where are we getting the Internet from??

[sterno]

This article seems to not appreciate one minor issue. Most people get their Internet from either the cable company or the phone company. Whether you attach a wifi access point at the end and use VoIP to call people, you still have to pay them to get your Internet service.

Now, let's think about this...

Your local phone company charges you say $30/month for phone service. It then charges you $50/month for internet service. You get some VoIP setup and you end up paying them only $50/month instead of the $80 you would have been paying if you also had to get your phone through them. Or perhaps you get your service through a CLEC and you pay your CLEC $50, and now your phone company is only making even less on you (possibly less than they were on the original phone service).

Ultimately this suggests that the phone companies are going to end up charging higher fees for their Internet service in order to make up for the shortfall in local phone service.

Now, let's look at your cable company because they face similar problems. Why would I pay them $50/month for TV, and $50/month for internet, when I can just buy the Internet and get TV programming off the Internet? So they end up paying for a bunch of infrastructure and risk making the same amount they've been making. AT&T has tried to bundle VoIP phone service into their cable systems, but why would you buy it from them as opposed to anybody else?

Re:And where are we getting the Internet from??

[Anonymous Coward]

You are missing two points.

First is that the whole point of the article is that consumers can now build a good portion of the infrastructure themselves. That's what the analogy to the FedEx fax service was all about. If we could survive purely on radio ethernet, then the phone company could just peacefully go broke and we'd be none the poorer for it. If you only made calls within your dorm, you and your friends might get two-way walkie talkies, and the phone company could charge as much as they wanted for something no one would buy and then go out of business -- because the walkie-talkies amount to you providing your own infrastructure.

Now, radio ethernet cannot completely replace the wired infrastructure. But it can replace a lot of calls, nearly all the ones I care about, for example.

The other mistake you are making is the presumption that what is paid into the telecom industry is even on the same order of magnitude as the cost of maintaining the infrastructure. All of the telecom companies spend the majority of their cash on outrageous CEO salaries, the salaries of tens of thousands of unnecessary managers making work for the themselves and trouble for everyone else, and lobbying to preserve the vast morass of petty corruption that is the phone company.

A clean and well run telephone company would have no skyscraper headquarters, but a simple couple of floors of cubicles in some cheap office park and a few industrial facilities. It would have one tenth the employees and one twentyth the operating expenses.

The sooner the telecoms finally die the better.

EXACTLY that idiot proof

[Em Ellel]

Actually what I am talking about is service like Vonage, works kinda like Instant Messenger only in hardware. You log in and it keeps connection open, caller contacts the provider IP (or to be more exact, dials you phone number, yes a regular phone number) and your phone rings. No inbound ports open, NAT prefered (allows you to use your broadband for you home PC's, and in general a good idea for security). Noone cares what your IP is, as long as you can reach the internet.

-Em

Re:EXACTLY that idiot proof

[Maditude]

Thanks for the reply! I wasn't aware that the device made a persistent connection -- seems rather unusual. This would definitely be cheaper than my current long distance bill...

The Vonage financial model...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ever since I first bumped into the idea of VOIP in 1995, I've wondered if it could become commercially viable (aka profitable). I've been fiddling with the numbers for years and I've yet to be convinced that the Vonage (or any similar such) model actually makes money in the US. Everytime I thought that the cost delta between POTS and VOIP would would encourage enough people to sign up and start generating enough revenue to repay capital costs, phone companies cut long distance charges. At the current rate of $07/minute or so, VOIP isn't worth it to me or to most other US domestic customers. Where it does make financial sense to the consumer is in overseas calls, and particularly with calls originating outside the US. However, so few US citizens make such calls that, again, it isn't worthwhile to pay $30+/month to companies such as Vonage.

Re:The Vonage financial model...

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason why I am excited by developments such as this is that I would like to get rid of my phone for all calls. Local service should cost something like six to ten dollars a month, and you can't really seem to get it for less than $30. If you toss your telephone completely, you can almost afford broadband.

Also AT&T - Remember them?

[Anonymous Coward]

They're probably the largest internet carrier in terms of carried bits (certainly the largest solvent one), as well as probably the largest voice carrier, and for a while they were trying to do a combined set of telephony, data, cellphone, cable-modem, and fixed-wireless service, though they weren't able to sustain that financially long enough to get all the technology really developed and deployed, and the wireless people never did get that they were really in the VOIP business after they went difital. They also has Lucent, the former Western Electric manufacturing business, though they split that off before they got big in the internet backbine business.

Disclaimer: I work for a telephone company. You can say that they're not idiots sitting in a smoke-filled conference room with no vision, but that's largely because they haven't allowed smoking in conference rooms for over a decade....

WTF

[Anonymous Coward]

You run a porn site and don't have broadband? Are you out of your mind man?

Re:WTF

[NineNine]

After working on the site for a few hours, the *last* thing I want to do is to look at porn!

computers should report emergency brodcast info!!

[Anonymous Coward]

on a smiliar note, it really seems like by now web browsers/computers should be capable of receiving emergency broadcast information. imagine you are reading the web and email, watching and listening to streams on the net. they could be broadcasting information about an emergency flood, tidal wave, tornado, fire, whatever, ALL OVER radio and television.. you would be clueless. sure, there are implementation issues in getting the browser to be aware of where it is physically and tune to appropriate 'listen' channels [ports] for the emergency broadcasts, but none of that is an insurmountable technical challenge..

An argument for quality

[GeekWSpots]

I choose to argue with the quality issue. Quality is very, very important when it comes to voice communication. In business, or with personal conversations, little nuances of inflection, delay, volume etc. mean a lot. I'm pretty annoyed with cell phone quality and timing issues, I won't even use cell phones for much beyond short tactical use: "I'm outside your office building to give you a ride, the door is locked, I'll meet you outside" and the like, unless I'm really stuck.

It's just not the same thing.

Re:An argument for quality

[CIMLINC_85]

Cell phone timing issues are a huge pain. Ever start talking at the same time as the other person, then you both stop and wait for the other person to continue, then both start talking again at the same time? It's like a human CSMA/CD exchange and it sure makes it difficult to carry on a conversation. I really wonder how the latency of VoIP will compare.

Re:Can I dial a static IP using VOIP?

[Anonymous Coward]

Details? Do I just dial something like 123*123*123*123 on the phone plugged into my Cisco ATA 186 and the phone at IP address 123*123*123*123 starts ringing? Seriously, if you've got this (or seen this) working I'd like to know more about it.

The article misses one BIG point

[frovingslosh]

The article mentions both VoIP and Internet routers like the home Linksys devices. However, devices like the Linksys use NAT to share the connection amoung several computers/devices. VoIP and H.323 just doesn't work with NAT. The writer flat out states that all one needs to do to use VoIP is plug the ATA into the Hub/router, but that just ain't so.

Re:The article misses one BIG point

[Nynaeve]

That's why Linksys offers the EtherFast® Cable/DSL Voice Router

The Linksys EtherFast® Cable/DSL Voice Router is the perfect solution for connecting a small group of PCs to a high-speed broadband Internet connection or a 10/100 Ethernet backbone--and it features Voice Over IP telephone calls powered by Net2Phone. With the EtherFast® Cable/DSL Voice Router installed, no other special hardware is necessary for telephone calls. An ordinary telephone connects to the RJ-11 port (telephone jack) on the back of the EtherFast® Cable/DSL Voice Router, and calls are routed by Net2Phone's superior quality network to anywhere in the world--significantly reducing long distance charges.

Unfortunately, it appears you are locked into Net2Phone as your provider. Anyone have one of these?

Ob.

[Anonymous Coward]

Step #1: Scrap the existing network, which relies on pricey hardware switches and voice-specific protocols like Time Division Multiplexing (TDM).
Step #2: Replace it with a network that runs on inexpensive software switches and Internet Protocol (IP). This new network will cost less to build and be much cheaper to run.
Step #3: "Preserve the revenue stream" by continuing to charge the prices from the old, expensive network.
Step #4: ???
Step #5: Profit.

Re:Ob.

[SetiAlphaOne]

Step #1: Scrap the existing network, which relies on pricey hardware switches and voice-specific protocols like Time Division Multiplexing (TDM).
Step #2: Replace it with a network that runs on inexpensive software switches and Internet Protocol (IP). This new network will cost less to build and be much cheaper to run.
Step #3: "Preserve the revenue stream" by continuing to charge the prices from the old, expensive network.
Step #4: ??? <--- remove this line
Step #5: Profit.

The ??? step has already been filled in here -- q.v. step 3. The inflated "preserved stream" minus the smaller cost of the new infrastructure benefits is your profit.

Cue cards and bulletin boards...

[Ungrounded Lightning]

They're a decidedly technophobic bunch. You'd be surprised to see how many agencies in sizable cities still do their dispatching via cue cards and a bulletin board.

Cue cards and bulletin boards never crash.

(Well, maybe in a 7.1 earthquake. But one guy on each end can reboot a bulletin board in a couple seconds.)

competition indeed

[cat_jesus]

The wireless competition has been a good thing. Verizon just lost a residential customer because their wireless division is doing so well competing with the wireless telcos. The deal we got for our cells got us two new digital phones, free nights and weekends(including long distance), more time than we'll use for less money that we were paying on the old plan and for less money than our residential line plus long distance. With the increase in phone spam we were getting it will be refreshing to have cell phones as our primary residence phone.

It is still illegal for telemarketers to call cell phones right?

Private production of defense

[LaissezFaire]

I wasn't particularly wild about this article, but it's interesting anyway. "The Private Production of Defense" by Hans-Herman Hoppe of UNLV. Private Production of Defense it's a pdf.

Re:So get up get, get get down, 911 is a joke in V

[Ironica]

911 is designed to provide the following services:

- A universal, easy to remember phone number that people can dial in any kind of emergency.
- Quick forwarding of your crisis to the appropriate agency, whether it be fire, police, or paramedics, along with your location (even if you can't speak -- people have successfully used 911 to save their lives when choking, or when an armed intruder is present).
- Operators trained to talk you through the situation, with first-aid instructions, advice on how to stay safe, or just sympathy and a calm presence.

I can call the local police department, or fire department, or paramedics... but that's three numbers I need to know, for the area I'm in. If I'm at my friend's house and he keels over, I better hope he's looked them all up and has them clearly posted.

WiFi Internet Without Telco's... Period?

[Esion Modnar]

Most WiFi access points are just that-- access points to a wired internet backbone: telco's.

But, maybe 10 or 15 years from now, when WiFi is much more common (I can only guess), it would seem they would start to overlap and connect, kinda the way the internet grew. A packet could be routed from one WiFi zone to another, nothing but air. It would probably be slower, but it would be even more decentralized than the internet is now.

And it would appeal to the disestablishmentarianist (whew! run that through a spell checker) in all us geeks.

For all I know, this is already going on, and I'm just too poor to buy a clue.

Re:WiFi Internet Without Telco's... Period?

[JohnnyCannuk]

What you describe is possible now using mesh networking technology. See http://locustworld.com/and http://www.meshnetworks.com/

So combine a 'mesh' network topology with say, UltraWideBand (UWB) transmission technology (at higher power of course, or have a node every 10 meters :0 ).

The Mesh gives you the ability to create ad hoc, self-healing, wireless networks and the UWB (at higher power than the FCC currently allows) gives you incredibly high data transfer rates (average is 40 Mbps but it can get up to 1 Gig !!). UWB has the added advantage of being able to not be bocked by walls, water, or rock so it can be used anywhere. Many different apps can use the same frequencies because the information is "Pulse Width" modulated - unless you are listening for a particular pulse size (pico to nano seconds) everything else is ignored and is the same as background noise (and thus won't interfere with local radio, radar etc). Think interlocking networks sharing bandwidth and not interfering with each other...

All of the technology exists today for this totally decentralized network with very good throughput. No need for cables of telco at all. Add in some security features and we have a winner...

And it can only get better

Re:So get up get, get get down, 911 is a joke in V

[Ironica]

Today's phones (aside from cordless) are powered from the CO and hence a power outage in the customer premise doesn't cut off the customer calling for help.

I assume you meant cellular, not cordless. Cordless phones are the ones that are guaranteed not to work in a power outage, since the base station needs power to transmit to the phone.

Tell me how it makes sense for any more than say 5-10% of the population (really... what's broadband penetration at?)to go out and plunk down $40-50 US (us Canucks don't pay as much... :P ) then pay someone like Vonage (who serves relatively small pockets of the US thus far (at least if you want your number to be local...) another $40 smackers!

Right.. if I'm grandma, uncle Ted, or mom&dad I'll stick with my $30 Baby Bell line...

$30 huh?

When I actually used my landline, it was routinely $40-50 per month (including long distance, call waiting, etc... which are included in the $40 from Vonage). Currently, we pay around $85/month for our phone line... and $65 of that is "enhanced" DSL. That's $20/month for a phone that we spend more time talking to wrong numbers on than anything else. We'd probably do away with it entirely if my husband's cellular got better reception here. In my old apartment, I didn't even have a handset hooked up, and had the cheapest measured-rate service with no frills available from PacBell (which is cheaper than Verizon, the other big player in the LA residential market). I paid $53 and change per month, and the DSL portion was $39.95. (No, there was NO WAY to get DSL without getting phone service. And I didn't have a TV, so cable modem wouldn't have been cheaper.)

So if I was in the habit of using a landline for my calls, I'd probably jump at $40/month including everything, as would a lot of people... if only to get rid of their phone company (some aren't bad, but some are atrocious).

Fax Machine Invented LONG Time Ago

[Esion Modnar]

...in a galaxy far far away. Sorry couldn't resist.

Re:Fax Machine Invented LONG Time Ago

[Esion Modnar]

Here's the link I forgot...

http://www.howstuffworks.com/fax-machine1.htm

Canada is NOT implementing a universal broadb

[Anonymous Coward]

This statement is a complete fabrication.
Perhaps the real poster's name is Brian Tobin who quit as a Canadian goverment minister when his plan for universal broadband was cancelled two years ago.
You have been duped.

Re:Canada is NOT implementing a universal broadb

[davidstrauss]

How about Canada Delays Plan for Universal Broadband Access and Canada to Speed Up Rural Broadband Internet Access? While the first specifies a delay, it's hardly a cancellation. The first article's date is Dec 2001 and the second June 2002.

Federal Express cancelled Zapmail

[Anonymous Coward]

Zapmail did not fail.

Federal Express cancelled Zapmail because Federal Express could not complete the launching of its satellite network. In 1986, Challenger crashed and the space shuttle system was put on indefinite hold. Without regular shuttle launches, Federal Express couldn't get the rest of its satellite network launched. If Federal Express couldn't get the network completed for 100% US coverage, they could not deliver. So, Federal Express cancelled Zapmail.

Federal Express shut down Zapmail. Commerce and technology did not overtake and surpass Zapmail ... ... although, with hindsight, we know that commerce and technology would probably have overtaken and surpassed Zapmail.

It's worse than that, Shirky is blind.

[twitter]

The current situation in no way resembles the ZapNet case. Telcos welcomed the chance to charge long distance fees fax machines would generate and so allowed the connection to the existing network. They will not be so kind to Voice over IP (VoIP) and all other useful services people could run themselves. The laws are stacked against us.

The existing telcos control accesss and they are being DEREGULATED. This would be fine if there were real competition, but there is not. "Servers" are already forbiden over cable networks - and the cable company is set to sell you phone service. Guess what, Voice over IP without paying the cable company will be obtaining service from a cable without permision and a federal offense. DSL? forget it, the local Bells have crused their competitors and also forbid "servers." The laws are against you - AOL/Time/McDonald/M$/USPO doesnt think they can get $250/month from every house in the country because the local public service commision is going to give it to them. They think they are going to get it because they have made it illegal for you to use the wires that enter your house as you please. Vontage will be screwed by all of this.

802.11 meshes may offer a solution, but I fear the rainbow efforts of IBM and others. It won't take big companies long to convince the FCC to regulate the new wireless networks. The result will be most unAmerican - an artificailly limited electronic press which runs through shared property and the air itself.

Re:It's worse than that, Shirky is blind.

[Anonymous Coward]

ya know, comments like this are the reason I read slashdot. trudging through acres of sludge to find a diamond in a goat's ass.

excellent post, man, you hit the nail on the head!!

Re:So get up get, get get down, 911 is a joke in V

[EvlG]

(No, there was NO WAY to get DSL without getting phone service. And I didn't have a TV, so cable modem wouldn't have been cheaper.)

This is the thing that irks me the most.

Around here, in Dallas, cable modems are terrible. So the only real option for broadband is DSL. However, I hate having to pay for a landline telephone to get it.

FCC should mandate offering DSL service without making the customer pay for landline telephone service. It shuts out VoIP.

Just a few things...

[Ironica]

Interesting article overall, but I have to nitpick:

They are selling us a kind of ZapPhone service, where they've digitized their entire network up to the last mile, but are still charging the high and confusing rates established when the network was analog.

Well, no, they're not. I remember when I was a child, we'd sit there and wait until the phone ticked one minute past 5:00, then we'd call the family in Oklahoma. The amount you saved by calling "after the rates went down" was significant enough that in most residences, you didn't make long-distance calls during business hours unless it was an emergency.

I thought it was just my mom having grown up poor and all that, but then a couple years ago I had occasion to see the comparative per-minute rates from The Phone Company(tm) vs. Now. Then it all made sense. (Wish I could remember where I saw it so I could cite it.)

Since the company has been split up, and has switched over to digital signaling, our costs have gone down significantly. When you factor in cost-of-living changes, I believe that even the value-added services (like call waiting, voicemail, etc.) are significantly cheaper than they were a decade ago.

The average music lover was willing, even eager, to give up driving to the mall to buy high quality but expensive CDs, once Napster made it possible to download lower quality but free music.

Or so the RIAA would have you believe, but no one's yet demonstrated that P2P networking ever replaced any purchasing activity.

Voice over IP doesn't sound as good as a regular phone call, and everyone knows it. But like [MP3] music, people don't want the best voice quality they can get no matter what the cost, they want a minimum threshold of quality, after which they will choose phone service based on an overall mix of features.

I think the author missed a really good bet when he made this comparison. After all, cell phones are the really, really obvious example of how people don't care quite so much about voice quality in a telephone call. We're willing to say "What? What was that? Can you hear me now?" many times in a conversation if it means we can take our phones with us everywhere and play games on them when we're bored. Losing a little quality to have cheaper, more flexible "landline" service is a no-brainer.

Re:So get up get, get get down, 911 is a joke in V

[Ironica]

FCC should mandate offering DSL service without making the customer pay for landline telephone service. It shuts out VoIP.

Sure, it seems that way to the consumer. But what are the interests of the FCC? How do you demonstrate to them that DSL falls under their purvey, or more accurately, doesn't?

That's what's been boggling my mind for the last couple years: how do you convince the FCC to (a) take an interest in and (b) take a position in favor of mandating the unbundling of DSL from POTS. Sure, *I* know of all kinds of reasons, and if we were dealing with the FTC it might be easier to argue it... but from a communications standpoint, given what the FCC is in charge of doing, how do we convince them?

Re:So get up get, get get down, 911 is a joke in V

[smithdm3]

smithdm3 babbled: Today's phones (aside from cordless) are powered from the CO and hence a power outage in the customer premise doesn't cut off the customer calling for help.

Ironica kindly responded: I assume you meant cellular, not cordless. Cordless phones are the ones that are guaranteed not to work in a power outage, since the base station needs power to transmit to the phone.

----

Actually... I did mean cordless, hence the "aside from cordless" from which you should infer that cordless phones aren't powered by the CO (due to their basestation's need for power as you stated)

smithdm3 babbled on: Tell me how it makes sense for any more than say 5-10% of the population (really... what's broadband penetration at?)to go out and plunk down $40-50 US (us Canucks don't pay as much... :P ) then pay someone like Vonage (who serves relatively small pockets of the US thus far (at least if you want your number to be local...) another $40 smackers!

Right.. if I'm grandma, uncle Ted, or mom&dad I'll stick with my $30 Baby Bell line

Ironica wittily replied: $30 huh?

When I actually used my landline, it was routinely $40-50 per month (including long distance, call waiting, etc... which are included in the $40 from Vonage). Currently, we pay around $85/month for our phone line... and $65 of that is "enhanced" DSL. That's $20/month for a phone that we spend more time talking to wrong numbers on than anything else. We'd probably do away with it entirely if my husband's cellular got better reception here. In my old apartment, I didn't even have a handset hooked up, and had the cheapest measured-rate service with no frills available from PacBell (which is cheaper than Verizon, the other big player in the LA residential market). I paid $53 and change per month, and the DSL portion was $39.95. (No, there was NO WAY to get DSL without getting phone service. And I didn't have a TV, so cable modem wouldn't have been cheaper.)

So if I was in the habit of using a landline for my calls, I'd probably jump at $40/month including everything, as would a lot of people... if only to get rid of their phone company (some aren't bad, but some are atrocious).

----

So, things are bit different here North of the border. I have a Rogers cable modem (though both ADSL and a cable modem are quite comparable in price) and pay around $45 Cdn (30US) for it, a cell phone with which I have 250 minutes/month domestic (either local or long distance in Canada and the US) from Bell Mobility that runs $60 Cdn (40US) and a Bell land line that costs me around $50 Cdn (33US) + my overseas calling. If I didn't make phone calls overseas I probably wouldn't have the land line, but it's long distance rate is much cheaper than my cell's, plus, we don't have the crazy cell packages yet that you guys do in the US, our competitors have been milking long distance and airtime all they can (even though there are 4 of them!).

Regardless, I feel for you. I work for a telecom vendor and believe me, getting an ILEC to buy something to evolve their network is near impossible. But that's just the way it is - maybe in the next year or so when their DSL margins (caution it's a 400KB pdf) start taking off things will be better.

wow!

[Anonymous Coward]

a well-thought out piece that doesn't rant about linux or ms gets linked on slashdot... jesus, is that you?

Re:So get up get, get get down, 911 is a joke in V

[EvlG]

I remember before 911 was in place, we learned local emergency numbers eary in school, and made cute sticks to place on or near the phones with these on there.

About 3 years later 911 hit and all that was forgotten.

Re:So get up get, get get down, 911 is a joke in V

[EvlG]

Government exists to serve the people.

Shouldn't the people remind government of that, to get what the people want?

manual backups

[Anonymous Coward]

They're a decidedly technophobic bunch. You'd be surprised to see how many agencies in sizable cities still do their dispatching via cue cards and a bulletin board.

manual backup systems are always a good idea.

think of that next time you fly. yes, FAA radars are known to fail occasionally!

You want bandwidth?

[icepick]

The telecos have been making promises to get all of the US on higher bandwidth connections. They made these promises to the FCC. FCC said great, raise your prices for basic services so that you can build these new service.

So prices raised, telecos earn $48 Billion, with $8 Billion more coming in every year, customers get nothing. Do you understand why we must protest to congress?

Read all about it here

Still trying to figure out the best way to fight this problem.

Re: A few FedEx details ... Let me knit kpick, too

[poena.dare]

I had the honor and the horror of being a minor peon in The Great ZapMail Experiment and would like to add some additional details. It is obvious to me Clay Shirky was wandering in darkness on his ZapMail analogy.

Briefly put:

1) The price of a emergent fax machines was too steep for small businesses. The prices dropped amazingly in the next four years. (In retrospect, you young'un's would say it was too slow.)

2) Faxes in 1984 were crappy as hell and most all used thermal paper with a very short lifespan. Uncle Fred was bringing 415 dpi (not 300) to the world on crisp heavy bond paper. Hot damn!

3) There actually was a discussion in 1983 about faxes being unacceptable to most trial judges in legal proceedings. (i.e. they would only allow 'real' original documents to be used in court.) Uncle Fred hoped that FedEx would be able to convince the legal community that ZapMail was absolutely, positively as good as the original and tamper proof. I don't know what specific game plan Uncle Fred had in mind, but he was a visionary when it came to ARM (Analog Rights Management). Of course, once any Tom, Dick, or Harry could get their hands on a fax machine, the stigma of duplicated documents instantly disappeared.

After 1988 I was fortunate enough to get a few lasers and a handful of DRAM from a friendly FedEx engineer, which I subsequently lost... I've been feeling bad about that for a while now.

However, because of this article I have discovered that you can buy ZapMail print engines online! Damn, I love the internet!

VoIP = high quality telephone?

[herrd0kt0r]

who's to say that voip necessarily means that it's limited to standard telco quality? why not pump up the bandwidth and slap the CPU around by compressing mp3 on the fly? imagine:

- phone conversations that make it sound like the other person was RIGHT THERE!
- you can hold the phone up to the radio and uh. something like. uh. easy shoutcasting!
- superior phone sex!
- etc.

no, really. i'm serious. regular telephone sound quality sucks rocks. market it smart, and make people believe they NEED better sound quality from their phone conversations! sucker them in!

ah, yes. another technology driven by pr0n.

Re: Take it on vacation with you

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmm, even cooler. Take the box with you on vacation - as long as you can get TCP/IP, you won't have to mess with phone or message forwarding.

That's exactly what I'm doing at the moment, I have my Vonage box connected to DSL in europe, and I also have my AT&T cellphone with me using international roaming.

If I get a call from the states it's $1.60 a minute to use the cellphone, or $0.00 to use the Vonage box. If I want to call the states it's the same prices or approx $0.40 a minute to dial from a landline.

There's latency and some quality loss on the call no matter which method I choose, but surprisingly the cellphone is the worst of the lot.

Zapmail was NOT a fax

[taaminator]

Zapmail was more than a fax, Zapmail was acceptable for legal purposes.

In 1984, I successfullly used Zapmail to send a check that needed to be in hand in NOW.

In 2003, next time you're at a commercial operation, ask them if they will accept a faxed check.

Zapmail was more than a fax, Zapmail was a dream come true which nothing has replaced.

Re:Open Source? More Like Openly Racist

[Anonymous Coward]

See? You whiny eurotrash prove his point.

View from a former telecom analyst

[jlaprise]

I think the article is dead on.

I performed a competitive analysis for a Baby Bell (BB) in a midwestern market. They could not understand how a local (W)ISP was providing T-1 equivalency for half the price (and still making a hefty profit). After doing some interviewing and research, it was clear that the BB had no real competitive options that they wanted to pursue. They could not compete on price without deploying wi-fi (thus obsolescing part of their landline infrastructure). The WISP in question was getting its IP connection from a non-BB IXC (e.g. AT&T, WorldCom,Level 3), insulating it from BB pressure. The BB's only competitive option was to impose hefty "disconnect fees" for those clients who switched.

The BB just didn't get it. None of them do. They fought to circumvent competition and enter the long distance market, thinking that there was a pot of gold there. This pot of gold has turned out to be only fool's gold as the profitability of long distance service has plummetted. Moreover, so-called bundled service for business clients (especially for medium and large companies) has also been a mirage. It's not unique-its the standard now. Additionally the lucrative big companies don't want to deal with (read: be dependent on) the BBs.

Here VoIP enters. Big companies can make VoIP pay off and run their own system without help from the BB. Right now, VoIP equipment is still a bit pricey at the consumer level, but the price is dropping and will continue to drop, despite resistance from the BB's.

The BB's are just too slow and conservative. Historically, why not? For a hundred years they've been the dominant game in town. They have crushed their competitors.

Surely, that won't change!

This seems illogical

[VirtualAdept]

There seems to be a major flaw in this argument. The failure of FedEx's fax network, it seems to me, happened because people were really willing to buy fax machines. Could the price of the fax machines have fallen far enough to make it worthwhile, faster than FedEx anticipated? Either way, the phone companies certainly weren't crying when the fax machine started being widely used by businesses. It was yet another use for the huge networks they had created, and one that would be profitable for them. Which is why I don't think VOIP or wireless networks are going to destroy the telecom firm. Why would it? To use these products, customers still need to connect all their nifty gadgets to an network connected to the internet. And the main broadband providers of internet access are the cable companies or the telecom firms. No, I think its more likely that when people start to really play with their broadbad and use all that capacity you're going to see it cost more as the companies are forced to upgrade their networks. It could, very well, end up in the same kind of per-minute pricing scheme that we have with the phone systems.

Re:So get up get, get get down, 911 is a joke in V

[Rob Parkhill]

In my old apartment, I didn't even have a handset hooked up, and had the cheapest measured-rate service with no frills available from PacBell (which is cheaper than Verizon, the other big player in the LA residential market). I paid $53 and change per month, and the DSL portion was $39.95. (No, there was NO WAY to get DSL without getting phone service. And I didn't have a TV, so cable modem wouldn't have been cheaper.)

Problem is, you will still need to pay for your phone line and DSL service, and then pay another $40 on top of that for the VoIP service. From what I can tell, the VoIP service does NOT include an internet connection. You have to have one already.

Faxing resumes from Kinko's

[T1girl]

I'm always amazed at the help-wanted ads that demand that you fax your resume. If you're unemployed, you probably don't have easy access to a fax machine. If you have a job, you probably share a fax machine and don't want your employer and co-workers to know you're looking elsewhere. So it's off to Kinko's you go - but happens if the recipient faxes you a reply - does it end up in the wastebasket at Kinko?

Re:What we need, is to get rid of the monopolies

[Ubernutter]

OK economics 101 for idiot boy. The current definition of a monopoly as used to describe the market inequality of a single supplier was set by Adam Smith who wrote the 'Wealth of Nations'. The free market as posited by Smith and revered by you capitalists has NEVER existed - it has eight pre-conditions at least one of which would require the banning of all advertising and branding. Barriers to entering the market are numerous, and usually are caused by current businesses within that sector rather than by governments. The ideal pictured by A. Smith may be a beautiful thing but it just don't exist.

didnt think about one thing

[clarkc3]

D. VOIP is moot as cell phones are becoming increasingly better and cheaper. I can call anyone in the country from anywhere in the country as part of the minutes I buy every month. Why would I want to step backwards to be tied down to a land line (ie: Net connection)? I don't.

You obviously have never made international calls with your cell phone and seen the bill. One of my friends lived in Europe for a year and paid 5 a minute to call back to the US using VOIP - his cell phone company charged him $1.50 before that, and even with the international calling plan, his POTS line there charged about 50 minute.

faxes didn't have a legacy factor

[dfries]

The only way VoIP would achieve the cost appeal that faxing has achieved is to buy a telephone line (internet connection), buy a fax (VoIP box), and not pay for the privilege for using a fax (VoIP) instead of a telephone (web browser). I don't think people will go for this system, clearly Vonage.com agrees, people pay them money to inneroperate VoIP with the legacy telephone system without any benefit of a standard telephone except price.

Faxing took over because it was something new and didn't have to displace a technology that was already working. A business bought a fax and let people know they had one. If someone wanted to get a fax from them or send one, they had to go out and buy a fax machine.

That doesn't work so well for VoIP. Someone going out and buying a VoIP system doesn't want to wait around and only use it with people who also went out and bought a VoIP system, they want it to automatically work like their regular telephone system works. The only thing we are doing with the current VoIP system, Vonage.com for an example, is who we are playing for phone service. Sure they are charging less especially if you are using long distance, but you are replacing a wired telephone that is limited to calling telephone numbers with a box that... calls telephone numbers.

What we need to do is buy the VoIP box and interface with other VoIP boxes without paying for the legacy telephone connection. The $40 a month Vonage.com is going to the telephone connection they provide.

We don't need a central registry for VoIP to work, think about how e-mail works, there isn't any central registry of all the internet e-mail addresses. There are tons of e-mail directories, and VoIP could work the same.

Ditched Local Phone Monopoly, don't have VoIP yet

[snolan]

I ditched Verizon (the local RBOC monopoly) when they refused to correct their mistakes on my basic local service installation. Their total disregard for me as a customer, based in the (un)sound logic that I had no choice was what put me off.

I had not even investigated the possibility of VoIP when I made the call. I was not even sure broadband would be available in my area via cable modem (DSL was out, as one way or another it uses Verizon's incorrectly hooked up lines).

What I did know what that Nextel and Sprint coverage (wireless) was excellent in my new house, and that for less than I paid Verizon for a land-line, caller id, anonymous call blocking, and unlisted number - I get the same plus voicemail and effectively free US long distance from Nextel.

We got lucky and Comcast rolled cable modem access into the neighborhood a month before we moved in. It is expensive, but it works.

Comcast may even offer local phone service eventually, which could be interesting.

The only difficult thing has been clubbing my home security alarm monitoring company into accepting cell phone calls.

Best thing about it has been absolutely no cold calling (at least so far).

Vonage is quite good delay wise....

[Newer Guy]

I think that's the big improvement over AT&T. Vonage has a delay that I can not notice on both its U.S. and international calls. No echo either. I think that this all may have to do with the fact that the ATA (analog telephone adaptor) is located right at your phone.

Last Post!

[alpg]

All of the people in my building are insane. The guy above me designs
synthetic hairballs for ceramic cats. The lady across the hall tried to
rob a department store... with a pricing gun... She said, "Give me all
of the money in the vault, or I'm marking down everything in the store."
-- Steven Wright

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